The Whole Blooming World

How A Fluffy Movie Saved My Life

2012-01-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this post in response to a question a friend of mine posted on Facebook; she asked bloggers what their goals are for their blogs. I started to formulate a response, and quickly realized it would be too long-winded for a Facebook comment, because I have more than one blog, and more than one reason for each of them. (It's probably even too long-winded for a blog post, but you can decide that for yourself.)

This blog was my first. And I don't think I've ever confessed this here before, but I started it because of watching that epitome of "feel-good" (i.e., fluff) movies, Julie and Julia. If you've seen it, then you know that it's based on the true story of a woman who started a blog and eventually became famous for it.

Well, I knew going in that there was little chance of fame in blogging these days, now that EVERYONE has a blog. No, what convinced me to try it was what the Julie character said in the movie when she made the decision. She said it would be a "regimen" for her, and she saw it as something that would fulfill her need to do something meaningful and creative. This inspired me, because at the time, I had been living in Taos and working at Subway for about a year - it was one of the most miserable years of my life. I was a lifelong writer who wasn't writing, and hadn't really since I'd finished my Master's in creative writing four years earlier.

For my Master's, my concentration was poetry, but I had always wanted to get into writing personal essays. Blogging seemed like a great way to do that with the benefit of immediate gratification, just getting it out there and dropping the whole burden of "trying to get published," which graduate school had completely turned me off to.

So I started this blog, and proceeded to visit other people's blogs and leave comments. Within a fairly short time, blogging completely and wonderfully exceeded my expectations. I found myself part of an eclectic online community including (to name just a few) a young man who had been homeschooled, taught in Korea, then proceeded to get his bartender's license and his pilot's license more or less simultaneously; a male Buddhist kindergarten teacher in the Bay area who is married to the town's female mayor; an Australian storyteller-poet-naturalist; a glitzy woman entrepreneur in Dallas; a Scottish woman with equally passionate interests in cooking, photography, and literary pursuits of all kinds; and several spiritually-oriented women who sort of became my church. One of those women I actually count now among my very closest friends, even though we've still never met in person.

That in itself was fulfilling enough, but there was more. Blogging gave me the confidence to think of myself as a writer again, so I started a writing business called Illuminated Manuscripts and created another blog for it. I made business cards and brochures and joined the Taos Chamber of Commerce, and out of that, I got offered a job writing a weekly column for the Taos News, which I'm still writing today. Other writing jobs came my way as well, and I have found myself living my childhood dream of writing for a living.

However, since I now had several clients and was no longer working at Subway, one might say I had a life, and blogging began to take up less and less of my time. And anyone who blogs knows that if you don't do it on a pretty regular basis, the warm glowy sense of community begins to dissolve. Less and less people comment on your blog, as you comment less and less on theirs, and after a while you just kind of lose touch altogether. In the past year or so, I've posted here very infrequently, and hardly anyone comments anymore. It sort of feels like a ghost town. I miss those golden days, but that's okay.

The blog I started for Illuminated Manuscripts never really took off at all because I found myself with more than enough work without having to promote it. I'm now about to expand my business' services and will be building a new website for it elsewhere.

My third blog came about when I decided to buy land off-grid and build an earthbag house on it. Where my purpose for The Whole Blooming World was simply to be writing and sharing that writing, my purpose for Home Sweet Hive is more to document my project and connect with other people doing similar things. It fascinates me to see that an entirely different group of bloggers has sprung up around me over there, although there are a couple of loyal readers that followed me over from this blog.

I know a lot of people blog for money, and I also know that if you want your business to grow online you should have a blog, but so far, blogging has had nothing to do with these things for me personally. However, nowadays, I write the weekly blog for the business of one of my clients, and I've seen how it can be a whole different animal. And once I get my new site up for Illuminated Manuscripts, I will be blogging regularly there for the sake of promoting my business.

Even though this blog has faded into the background of my life and there is little chance that will change in the foreseeable future, I know from time to time I'll still post here even if no one's reading it, because it's become for me a way to track and tell and change the story of my inner life.

If I hadn't watched Julie and Julia it's hard to imagine that my life would be as rich as it is today. So there's a lot to be said for fluff. For instance, milkweed is fluffy but plays several important roles: it remedies poison ivy, insulates, repels pests from plants in its vicinity, removes warts, and serves as the sole food source for monarch butterfly larvae.

But I guess some curmudgeons would consider butterflies "fluff" too. Too bad for them.

Money-Time

2011-11-21T13:43:00.001-07:00

My green year is winding down, and in this last portion of it, I have turned my attention toward the last green-related item I wanted to work with this year: money.

Money has always been a bit of a bugbear for me. When I was a teenager I rejected my comfortable middle-class upbringing and decided I was "anti-materialistic," i.e., anti-money.

I got over that quite some time ago, but the truth is that I've never been good with money. It tends to slip through my fingers alarmingly quickly, and my overall financial life has been very much feast or famine, and utterly chaotic.

So I've been working with a book called The Energy of Money, by Maria Nemeth, which approaches money from a spiritual viewpoint and guides you through a series of exercises to help you become conscious of and heal your relationship with money.

I'm still stuck on Chapter One, in which you are supposed to write your money autobiography. She provides a whole long list of thought-provoking questions to help the process. I shouldn't say I'm stuck, really, because even though I'm moving through this process very slowly, I AM doing it. It's eye-opening to say the least, and so I'm taking the time to really process what I'm writing.

One thing I've realized lately is that as I've been with money, so I've also been with time: confused about where it all goes. Which, of course, brings to mind that saying, Time is money. I never really understood what that meant, primarily because both time and money were such abstract concepts to me that I couldn't really comprehend either of them on a practical level.

But I get it now; it means that money comes to you for time spent earning it. Duh. Conventional wisdom might see this as a one-to-one correspondence: If I work so many hours, I will get so much pay. If I have a "bad" job, the pay will be low and if I have a "good" job the pay will be high. But frankly, I think it sucks either way, and I believe it can be different. In fact, I know it can. There's a sort of momentum that can be created around money that brings a greater and greater return with fewer and fewer hours. I've seen it in people I've written about for my Taos News column, Innovators & Entrepreneurs, and I also just know it intuitively.

Recently I was browsing at one of my favorite websites, mythinglinks.org, and I came across a very interesting page about money. The author of the site, Kathleen Jenks, laments that in terms of earning a living, "it's been unsettling to face thefact that I've lived most of this lifetime feeling like a racehorse hitchedto a plow."

Reading this really bummed me out, because I can relate. I also recently interviewed a woman for my column whose work life as a freelance writer and a teacher parallels mine. But she just started an online business (her website is journalsandnotepads.com), and she talked about how different this is from freelancing, where you're selling your TIME.

That conversation got me thinking about starting my own online business, but that's a story for another day. The significance for this discussion is that it was yet another pointer to my need to focus on my relationships with time and money. I began to think that perhaps a budget would not be such a bad thing after all. And while I've always been okay with schedules, I haven't been disciplined enough about them when I'm working at home on "my own" time. So I decided that thinking of a schedule as a sort of time-budget might be a better idea - to trick myself into sticking to it, essentially. I've decided that the planner I get for 2012 will have the hours of the day in it so that instead of just making a list of what needs to be done each day, I can actually schedule all of it.

I also signed up at Mint.com. I had read several very good reviews of it, and then came across another one recently that finally convinced me to check it out. And I have to say, I LOVE it. I honestly cannot overstate how much this tool is helping me at last to really grasp my money situation and how to manage it. It's like when you look at what appears to be the chaotic blur of a stereogram and then finally see the image, and go, "Oh wow, yeah," and your eyes relax. For the first time in my life, I have made a balanced budget that is realistically based on what I actually have coming in, and I can see exactly where all of my money is going.

This is both relaxing and and freeing, which is ironic, considering how long I resisted budgeting because I felt it would be so stifling.

It's an interesting side benefit that budgeting my money is helping me budget my time as well. I'm currently writing an ebook for a client who pays me an hourly rate. It's up to me how many hours a week I put in. What I've been able to do is put into my Mint.com budget the amount of money I need to make monthly working on the ebook, and then figure out exactly how many hours a week I need to put in to make that happen. Cake!

All of this has resulted in an incredible feeling of awakening and empowerment in these areas of my life. I realize now that I've always let money and time just kind of happen to me, but I'm increasingly feeling like I'm in the driver's seat. Money and time are tools, and while there will of course be unexpected things that happen and certain limits beyond my power to change, overall it's possible to exercise control over how I receive and use them, and in doing so, the mysterious result is abundance.

The Little Things

2011-11-17T17:08:00.001-07:00

To step over the south-facing threshold of this darkening house and out
into the surprising almost light, the winter smell of cold and diesel,

to turn one way, west, toward a silhouette of shoes,
laces tied together,
flung over a wire
beside so perfectly unstraight a stroke
of pulsing black, a pole,

then nine strides north to where
those two horses made of grass and wind
draw changing angles to the ground,
whose soft noses break

my green heart, oh what it is.

I had merely thought to smoke.

Why would I call these things little
when they live me
as the life I do not have,
as large as this only moment.

My Heart's Content

2011-11-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

Last night as I was lying in bed, I landed on the word "content" to describe how I've been feeling lately. This is not a word I've ever given much attention to; it's not phonetically beautiful, and definition-wise it's always seemed a little boring and naive to me. But when it came to me last night, it floated into my consciousness in a way that made me see it as if for the first time. I began to consider what it actually means to be content, to not desire anything more than what one has, because that is truly what I was feeling as I lay there.

We live in a culture that so values goal-setting and achievement, that it's no wonder contentedness is barely on the radar, that my automatic response to the word has been a sense of dullness and disinterest. I mean, if you don't want anything, what fun is that? What would motivate you to get up in the morning and DO anything? Who would ever receive special recognition for how content they are?

It had never really occurred to me that the meanings of the word as an adjective (con-TENT) and as a noun (CON-tent) are actually related. When I did a little research this morning, I discovered that they in fact have the exact same source - the Latin contentus, meaning "contained."

And this is perfect. The feeling of contentedness that I've been experiencing on and off lately has everything to do with the content of my life - not the circumstances, the content. The substance. It's all about what's inside the container of my life, which is related to circumstances, but only in the sense of how I perceive, experience, and integrate them.

Contentedness, I'm finding, is not a position of dullness and complacency, but a dynamic state in which the things my life wants to move into are contained. They find satisfaction first within my being and then flow out into form. It's not that I don't want anything, it's that want is reduced to its essence, a recognition that it's more about merging with energies than attaining objects. By merging with those energies within first, even the energy of desire, there is a first-level satisfaction, a contentedness created, which then allows the manifestation of any desire outwardly to be a natural momentum rather than a future-based striving.

In other words, my heart's cont-TENT because of its CON-tent.

The heart my very best friend crocheted for me.

Back From the Hive

2011-09-17T15:05:00.000-06:00

Today is my two-year blogging anniversary, and I couldn't let that slip by without making note of it. The last time I posted here was in March. Seven months ago, wow. With the advent of my new blog, Home Sweet Hive, about my housebuilding/off-grid adventure, I've sorely neglected this one.

It's been interesting to have a blog that's so very different from this one, with different subject matter and a new variety of virtual community. But I've missed those of you who I used to connect with through The Whole Blooming World, and I've missed blogging about the kinds of things I've written about here. I'm about to move back to town for the winter and one of my jobs is about to end, so I'm planning to spend more time here over the next few months, and to make time once again to read my "old" friends' blogs.

I love the fact that picking a color/theme for the year came out of blogging. This green year has reflected "greenness" in a variety of ways. Reflecting on it lately, I've been thinking about the Green Tara, and how she stands for "enlightened activity." This has definitely been a year of activity, of outward movement and energy. It's been great: challenging and rewarding in ways very new to me. Fulfilling.

But now I find myself thirsting for the inwardness of fall and winter, taking the time to retreat and rest a bit and process all that has happened, all that I've learned and done. I look forward to sharing some of that here.

The Giver of Rocks

2011-03-17T08:51:00.000-06:00

So it turns out I'm not quite done with the San Francisco de Asis church after all. And it occurs to me that really, as long as I'm living in Taos, I will periodically find the time to stop by and sit by Clare and the hawkmoths.

Last Sunday, Eliana kept saying she wanted to go for a walk, so we went over there together, which is something we haven't done very often, and the last time she was still too little to walk by herself. But this time, we went side by side, and it was lovely. And when we walked through the grove that is no longer a grove, I noticed that the huge tarp they left there after enjarre last summer was still there. (To be honest, part of what I was looking forward to about this walk was seeing if the tarp was still there, because 70% of my thinking these days is about where to get building materials and equipment, and tarps are needed to protect earthbags from UV rays during the building process.) When I stretched it out and saw how big it really was, I realized I would need help folding it, so I called Graeme and he came to help me and then carried it back home.

Then Eliana and I proceeded on to the church, and I came across my second great find as we walked through the alley next to the gift shop. They often leave boxes of empty used glass 7-day candleholders out there, but this was the first time they seemed of any use. I've been researching making windows using old bottles and jars lodged in cob, so I was very excited to find these. Now I will have part of the church permanently built into my house.

Do you see the cross design? So cool!

Over at the church, there were quite a few visitors milling about the courtyard, and I found myself sitting at St. Francis' feet engrossed in a pleasant conversation with a couple from Dallas. Meanwhile, Eliana was running happily around the courtyard, picking up rocks and then running up to whoever was nearby and saying "Here's a rock for you." One couple was so delighted with this, they even included her in the photo they were posing for in front of the church doors.

It was a beautiful spring day, one of the first of the season, and I felt rich in my relationship with that place again, and blessed with the abundance of gifts of the day. A tarp, a box of candleholders, a daughter who's an exuberant giver of rocks. In my Lenten practice of giving up "stuff," it's these simple things that are coming to me in the new space I'm making. I think Francis and Clare would approve.

Into the Desert

2011-03-09T15:29:00.000-07:00

Lent is upon us again; I can't even believe a whole year has gone by since last year's life-changing Lent of giving up negative thought.

I've been so caught up in my housebuilding plans that I haven't given much thought to Lent at all this year, until a couple of days ago, when it suddenly struck me that I'm literally going into the desert for Lent this time!

Over the past few weeks, the occasional thought has crossed my mind about what to give up this year, but nothing was really jumping out at me. Then the other day, as I was perusing the many tasks ahead of me before I can start building my house, the one that settled on my brain like a giant bloodsucking leech was about having to move out of this house. Dealing with all that STUFF: sorting it, selling it, throwing some away, taking some to the Free Box, dividing some up between my two oldest daughters to take to their respective apartments, possibly putting some in storage (ugh!), and ultimately just narrowing it all down to what is essential - because I'll be living in a 32-foot bus for several months. And even after my house is built, I will need to live more simply as it's going to be on the small side.

Sigh. I hate moving.

Today though, it occurred to me that I could just give up "stuff" for Lent. Dress the whole dreaded task as a spiritual practice, thereby enlivening and redeeming it. Now I'm actually excited to begin this process, and it's nice that I have a couple of months to do it all. This way, I can focus on one little area at a time and be thorough and unrushed.

Just one of the many places in my house where there's TOO MUCH STUFF

I happened across an article today called The Zero-Waste Home from the January edition of Sunset magazine, about a family who lives very simply, producing almost no garbage. I don't know if I'll ever live as austerely as they do (they don't even have any pictures on their walls), but it definitely inspired me to pare down quite a bit, to get excited about the challenge of choosing to keep only those things that are functional and/or inspirational.

My plan is to release at least one thing from my possession every day of Lent. Some days it will be much more than one thing, but the goal is to be fully prepared to be out of this house with a minimum of - well, everything - by Easter.

And when I finally do get out into the desert, I will be carrying a much lighter load. Literally.

All My Longings Know Where To Go

2011-03-04T13:12:00.000-07:00

I love the relationship I've developed with our northern New Mexico spring. When I lived in Louisiana, spring started in February, and by Mardi Gras, all the azaleas were blooming and I could comfortably open every window in the house. Not so in northern New Mexico. It took me several years to get used to the fact that February is still winter here. Since February is also my birthday month, this felt like a personal insult.

But now, I've stopped looking for spring where it's not to be found, and embraced winter in its fullness instead. I tend to forget that spring is even a possibility; I don't hope for it anymore. So when it does arrive, it's always an unexpected delight. It's a little like when you know what you're getting for your birthday, but the giver wraps it anyway so you get the pleasure of tearing the paper away.

Spring has begun to make her descent, and once again I find myself unexpectedly enlivened and delighted. But this spring, there is the added factor of my housebuilding plans. Spring means it's time to build, and I couldn't be more excited to begin.

A month or two ago, I copied the following horoscope from Rob Brezsny into this post draft, because it rang so true for me.

"All your longings know where to go," writes poet Nick Piombino, "but you have to tell them to open their eyes." That's one of your big assignments in 2011, Pisces: to make sure your longings keep their eyes open. It's not as easy as it might sound. Sometimes your longings get so entranced by obsessive fantasies -- so distracted by the stories that are swirling around in your imagination -- that they're blind to what's right in front of them. You must speak to your longings tenderly and patiently, as you would a beloved animal, coaxing them to trust that life will bring more interesting and useful blessings than anything fantasy could provide. ~ Rob Brezsny, Freewill Astrology

Well, folks, my longing's eyes are open, and life has indeed been providing "more interesting and useful blessings than anything fantasy could provide." In fact, I've been continually astounded by how beautifully different aspects of my housebuilding project have been falling into place. I won't go into detail about that here, but if you're interested, you can read all about it at my new blog, Home Sweet Hive.

What I will say, though, is that my direction has definitely changed. It occurred to me recently that I haven't even thought about the San Francisco church in a while, and in conversation with my dear blogging friend, Jennifer, I realized that it's time to close the door on that chapter of my life.

However, part of my plan for building a house has involved getting a 4WD vehicle for the rough terrain where my land will be, and when I contacted the man I ended up buying my new Chevy Blazer from, he suggested we meet in the church parking lot. Walking over there that morning, I felt a satisfying sense of closure, that a beginning was happening in the exact place where something else was ending.

Another thing I copied into this post a while back (I do that sometimes, just gather snippets to build a post around later) was this quote from Thomas Merton, via Abbey of the Arts:

Forest and field, sun and wind and sky, earth and water, all speak the same silent language, reminding the monk that he is here to develop like the things that grow all around him.

The last snippet I had copied into this post was about clouds, as I noticed after I made my 2011 collage that there were an awful lot of them, which I didn't consciously intend.

I began to think about clouds as living things, and taking my cue from Merton, I pondered how I could develop like a cloud. This goes back to longings, because I think of the expression "head in the clouds." With this building project, I feel a profound balance of head in the clouds and feet firmly planted on the ground.

Developing "like the things that grow" is what building an off-grid house is about for me, and I've realized that it's not just flowers and trees, hummingbirds and bats that serve as models, but that gorgeous, handmade, majestic church building that I've sat gazing at for so long. She herself is a growing, living thing, and that's how I want my house to be.

New Adventure, New Blog

2011-02-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I had a life-changing conversation with two of my kids, which has resulted in a new direction for me: I'm going to build an off-grid house with my own hands (and my kids' hands, and whoever else wants to help).

It wasn't until after this conversation that it occurred to me what an appropriate project this is for the "green" year that I'm in. Not just because of the association of green with environmental sustainability, but also because of it being the color of the heart chakra, and this is a project very much from my heart. I've wanted to do this for years, and for a variety of reasons, now is the time.

I was originally thinking I would blog about this journey here, but soon realized it needs its own space, so I have started a new blog called Home Sweet Hive, and just published my first post. In building a new physical structure, I will be simultaneously build a virtual structure for it. I hope you'll check it out.

Mother and Child

2011-02-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

*I've been told this didn't post right the first time, so I'm trying it again. If you've already read it, sorry for the repeat.*

I'm not just the innocent that needs protecting, I'm the compassionate mother who weaves and wraps the blanket. I'm the child who is healing and the resurrected woman both.

That's one of the conclusions I came to in my Recovery post last Sunday. (Achtung: If you haven't read that post, this one is not going to make much sense.) This insight, while connected to the bat orphans, the Raccoon card, and the Inanna story I spoke of in that post, comes most deeply and directly out of these images from my 2011 collage:

This one is at the very top center of the collage.

This one is at the very bottom center.

When I chose the top image, it was because she was green and pretty; I felt drawn to her for no articulated reason. I chose the little girl at the bottom because she exuded innocence to me, she represented the return to childhood that I have been experiencing in various ways and want to continue nurturing. And she was pretty. I put her on the green apple because I'd already chosen the apple image (because it was green, and represented abundance) and needed somewhere to put it; they just fit well together.

It wasn't until a few days later that I thought to do some research on the top image. The little book I got her out of, A Gift of Happiness, had the picture labeled as Green Tara, but I didn't know anything about her at all. So I Googled her and found out some wonderful things, which I printed out in green ink, put in a green folder, and read through, underlining things that particularly interested me. What really caught my attention at that time was that she is known as "the Mother of Liberation," "the Mother of Mercy and Compassion," and she represents enlightened action. And it struck me how perfect it was that the mother is at the top of the collage and the child at the bottom, and that both images represent aspects of myself.

After the protection and fierceness themes came up, I went back and read my folder about Green Tara again, and lo and behold, this is what I read; it didn't really register the first time:

During our spiritual growth we need to turn to our Holy Mother, Tara, for refuge. She protects us from all internal and external dangers (http://kadampa.org/en/buddhism/tara-puja/)

Tara is a female Buddha, and Green is only one of her 21 manifestations, but is also the most popular. According to my source, "she is the fiercer form of Tara." In other words, she is fierce compassion, fierce blessing, fierce protection.

Wow.

Buddhism is not a religion of deity worship. It's more like a system of spiritual practices, although I'm no expert. But the existence of Tara goes back way far in both Hinduism and Buddhism, and it seems that she is primarily related to as a meditation deity. There is a mantra associated with her: om tare tuttare ture svaha, the reciting of which is said to "untangle knots of psychic energy," among other things.

According to Wikipedia, the Tara practice consists of meditating on the visual image of her in order to incorporate her qualities; in this sense she becomes an "indwelling deity," which is the same idea behind all good Christianity. But Buddhism takes it a step further, because by practicing this as a disciplined meditation, the practitioner eventually comes to see that Tara has "as much reality as any other phenomena apprehended through the mind." The result is "the realization of Ultimate Truth as a vast display of Emptiness and Luminosity" because "one dissolves the created deity form and at the same time also realizes how much of what we call the "self" is a creation of the mind, and has no long term substantial inherent existence."

All of this makes wonderful paradoxical mysterious sense to me, because as soon as I knew she was the compassionate protective Mother, I began imagining a story about her and the Child of my collage. The Child knows she is protected: she doesn't have to look up to make sure the Mother's still there. She is protected by her innocence and trust. She knows she is safe and loved, and so she is going about her business, making her daisy chain, her creative offering. She is aware of all that is around her and yet completely focused on her task. The Child IS the "enlightened action" Green Tara gives birth and form to.

The Child's face is hidden, yet her essence is not. We see the Mother's face instead, the Child's source. We see what the Child is doing, which is playful, beautiful, and innocent, and is made possible by the Mother's protection.

In my Recovery post, I used the metaphor of a blanket for maintaining warmth, but the Mother and Child in my collage are warm without a blanket; the Mother is in fact partially naked. This points to the time when the blanket will no longer be necessary, when the Sun itself will be my warmth. But now it is winter, and I will continue to wrap myself close for the time being.

Which brings me to Brigid, whose holiday, Imbolc, is February 1 and/or 2, depending on your source. She is connected with fire and water, poetry, and healing. She is another fierce Mother, and is a goddess (or saint if you'd rather) who I've felt connected to for a long time.

One of the traditions associated with celebrating Imbolc is to make a pledge for the coming year. Because her day affirms the promise of spring to come, the planting of seeds is a symbolic sealing of the pledge. But because this day also marks mid-winter, the blessing and lighting of candles is part of it too. To me, this recognizes that there is a season and movement to everything - a time to bundle up and withdraw and a time to dance naked in the sun, so to speak.

When I lit my room with many candles on Imbolc night and meditated on what my pledge would be, I sat before my collage until it became clear. In choosing "bless" as my word for the year, I had only thought in terms of giving blessing - blessing as enlightened action, I suppose - but in gazing at the Mother and Child, I suddenly understood that it must also be about opening to receive, gratefully, the blessings of my life. And so the pledge I made is to both give and receive Life's blessings.

The Mother blesses the Child and the Child blesses the Mother; they dissolve into one another, into pure Being.

A Marvelous Idea

2011-02-02T08:19:00.000-07:00

Via Eryl, I am taking part in a most wonderful exchange. This is how it works:

I promise to send something I make myself to the first 5 people who leave a comment on this post and who, in turn, promise to make the same offer on their blog. The rules are that you need to make the items personally and send them to your 5 folks within 2011.

I am so excited about this! Eryl has been crocheting characters (you really should go see them), and she says she will be crocheting me something green.

But what I'm really excited about is what I'm going to make. The first 5 people to comment will get a personalized collage from me. (Just keep in mind, if you're the fifth person to comment, you might not get it until Christmas.)

So who's down?

Recovery

2011-01-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

I have a deck of Medicine Cards; each card features a different animal, and the book by David Carson and Jamie Sams gives you an interpretation of the significance of each animal. I don't consult them much these days, but my 3-year-old, Eliana, likes to lay them all out, naming each animal. Often she'll do this when I'm sitting in my room reading or writing in my journal, and she's pretty good about putting them back in their box when she's done. But recently I found one that had somehow made it out into the living room and was face down on the floor. I picked it up and it was the Raccoon card, then I went to the book and read about it. The gist was the need to consider the meaning and uses of protection. Kinda random, I thought, but okay - I'll take it.

I started asking myself questions like, What is worth protecting, and from what? What do I truly have the power to protect?

I looked up the word "protect" in the dictionary, and was particularly caught by two concepts: guarding and covering. I thought of the verse from the biblical book of Proverbs: "Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life."

Since I was still musing over the "heart surgery" metaphor from my last post, this protection theme began to take on deeper significance, especially in connection with healing. When I looked up the word "heal," there was an emphasis on "closing," as in closing a wound. It occurred to me that one cannot heal until after the surgery is finished, because by its very nature, surgery is an opening, not a closing. To heal is to re-cover.

Then a Facebook friend of mine posted a link to this article and video about baby bats that have been orphaned in Australia due to flooding and were found on the ground covered in maggots. This post would get way too long if I went off on a tangent about the significance of bats for me, but I will just point out that they are pollinators, and I do hold a strong connection with them, which I may post about some time. Maybe it is because of this connection that I was so profoundly moved by these images:

Or maybe it's just because they're so darn cute. Regardless, this got me thinking that one protects what is weak that it may strengthen, what is young that it may grow mature, what is wounded that it may heal.

Then, a couple of days later at Abbey of the Arts, Christine posted the theme for her 49th Poetry Party and it was "Fierceness and Courage." She asked, "What are the things of your life you are called to protect fiercely?" I love the word fierce, and one of the best compliments I ever got was from someone who called me fierce. (The same person also told me I "look good disheveled" - another of my favorite compliments.)

With some of the issues I've been working through regarding a severed relationship in my life, I began to see how all of these things apply in a practical way.

I thought about St. Paul's definition of the armor of God. I realized that the only way to truly guard my heart is to bless from it. I saw that the thing worth protecting in me now is innocence, and the only way to protect it is to bless. This came out of a sudden understanding that my only choice in a situation that causes me great anger and pain is either to curse or to bless. And because the temptation to curse is so strong, so fierce, I realized I have to turn that into fierce blessing.

Did you ever see the scene in Tomb Raider when the villain has thrown a dagger toward someone, and, while time is stopped and the dagger is freeze-framed in midair, Lara Croft has to turn it around and point it back toward the villain? It takes an immense act of will, concentration, and strength; she has to use both hands, which she cuts in the process. That's what it's like turning cursing into blessing.

The sense of being unhinged that I spoke of in my last post, the image of a cut-up chicken, the metaphor of surgery - in contemplating protection and healing, I began to see what the next step was for me. Interestingly, around the same time as all the rest of this, I read in Sue Monk Kidd's The Dance of the Dissident Daughter:

In an old Sumerian myth, the Goddess Inanna, making a descent to the underworld, moves through seven gates. At each gate she must strip a piece of her clothing away until at last she is naked, arriving without any of her former trappings. At the depth of her descent she is turned into a piece of meat and hung on a meat hook for several days before being resurrected as a woman.

All of a sudden I can see my journey over the past year or so as an integrated thing. Starting in October of 2009, I began posting around the theme of nakedness as a metaphor for what I was experiencing in my life. (If you click here, it will take you to those posts.) Now I've had the meat hook experience. Which is exactly why protection has come up, I now understand. I'm like those baby bats - I'm fresh and new (green!) and I've been through the wringer, and now I need a warm soft blanket around me.

The mistake I've made in the past is unconsciously believing my coldness and anger can protect me, but in thinking about what a blanket does, I'm coming to understand it a new way. A blanket protects you by keeping the warmth you already have within you from escaping.

Epiphany: Keeping one's warmth close to oneself is not the same thing as being cold toward others.

I'm not just the innocent that needs protecting, I'm the compassionate mother who weaves and wraps the blanket. I'm the child who is healing and the resurrected woman both.

Taking all these signs and insights that are coming to me from multiple directions is how the blanket is woven. Or maybe a quilt would be a better metaphor. A quilt is, after all, a kind of collage.

And speaking of collages, I haven't yet told you how all of this connects with my 2011 collage. I'll save that for next time.

Heart Surgery

2011-01-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

God has to work on your soul “in secret,” according to the saints and mystics. If God gave you any idea of what God was doing, which is always radical surgery, you would do one of two things: you would try to stop it, or you would try to engineer it and take control of the process. God has to operate in darkness to get the job done. ~Richard Rohr

I chose the word bless as my word for the year because of a book that friend, author, and fellow blogger, Jonna-Lynn gave me. This book is called The Gentle Art of Blessing: A Simple Practice That Will Transform You and Your World and was written by a man named Pierre Pradervand. The premise of the book truly is simple; it's the idea of practicing blessing any- and everyone who (literally or mentally) crosses your path (including yourself). And in terms of freeing the mind from negative and obsessive thoughts about the self and others, it really works. For it to work, however, the blessings must be sincere, they must come from the heart, and this of course is the hard part. But I've discovered that if I am the least little bit willing, and can muster up just one simple blessing-thought, it quickly blossoms into more.

With this blessing practice combined with green as my color for the year, which is the color related to the heart chakra, I already feel enfolded in an intense gentleness, energized by a vibrant airiness, circulated by a lush bright flow.

And yet, there is something else going on too, something I've been having great difficulty putting my finger on. When I tried to write about the feelings I've been having in my journal the other day, I kept seeing the image of cutting up a chicken, and thinking of the word "unhinged," and a Bible verse came to me, Hebrews 4:12: "For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." This is the best description of what's been happening within me that I have found so far.

I have been slowly replacing the word "God" in my vocabulary with "Being." Eckhart Tolle points out in The Power of Now that for many people, "God" as a word has become too tired and overused (and even abused) to truly point to what it points to anymore, which is far more mysterious than anyone can fathom. The word "Being" however, is very open-ended; an atheist could probably use it comfortably, and it points to the great mystery of sentient presence, whatever you believe its origins to be.

My point in saying all this, is that for me, "the word of God" is any manifestation of Being that I pay close attention to, which is to say, anything at all. By this process of blessing and by simply practicing presence in the moment as I have for several months now, things have become loosened within me, and lately I have this sense of being unhinged. When negative thoughts try to take over my mind these days, I experience it far more intensely in my body than I ever used to. Specifically, I feel it as a trembling and weakness and acute anxiety in the area of my heart. However, it's also much easier for me to recognize and move out of such negativity. Moving into blessing is one way to do that, putting my attention on how I feel inside my body is another. Sometimes all I need to do is breathe.

The dividing of soul and spirit mentioned in the verse above I read as the division of the temporal and the eternal, the self that uses mind to operate in the world, and the selfless spirit that is the eternal witness. According to these definitions, I can say that by practicing watching my self/soul, I have become more aware of the spirit, the one who watches. All of these words are inedequate; I have no way to really explain this. I'm always relieved when I find a metaphor to express such things, and yesterday morning as I sat in meditation with these deeply disturbing physical/emotional sensations, I finally landed on a metaphor that fits, and the moment I did, I felt centered and calm: Pruning. Green surgery.

Back in June, I discussed pruning as metaphor in a post called The Ruthless Gardener, but back then, the pruning was about outer situations and relationships; now it's more intimate. It's about thought processes, cherished mental habits and beliefs, and so on.

Somehow, by envisioning limbs being cut off a tree, I came to peace with the loss of control I've been feeling. Which has resulted from a greater and greater recognition of the illusion of any such control, that the thought-habits the mind cherishes are its always futile attempt to make control real and grasp it forever.

Yikes! That's way too convoluted. Let's try this instead:

The spirit prunes the soul; Being prunes everything that interferes with Itself.

The Synergy of Spheres

2011-01-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

I could start anywhere, because the collage of images I am contemplating has no beginning. Or it has many beginnings.

But because I must start somewhere, I'll do it with the point in time just before the collage was made, which was the day before New Year's Eve 2010. I already knew my word for 2011 was bless, and the color was green, and so I decided to make a collage that reflected these guides. Last year was my first to use a guiding word and color, and it was a wonderful experience to go through the year with those polestars. This year, I have taken it a step further, by creating a guiding image, or rather, a combination of guiding images, which I know I will be contemplating the connections among all year long. And this thrills and composes me in a way I cannot describe.

As I said in my last post, I make collages usually with some kind of general intention or theme, but the specific images often continue to surprise me with meanings I did not see when I chose them, meanings that deepen and radiate with time. I finished my collage the morning of New Year's Eve, and in the few short days into this fresh green year, I have already been amazed at what it has revealed to me. So amazed, in fact, that I had to make a mind map to start tracking the connections.

I would so love to see this in an interactive 3D version. Oh wait - that's the world.

I did something like this last year too, and then attempted to discuss all the connections in one post. Okay, it was two, plus an addendum and a poem. I won't bombard you in this post with excited ramblings about how all the things in my mind map connect. In fact, I won't even begin to discuss them. However, be forewarned that I will likely be posting throughout the year about these and other connections I have yet to even see. I just have a feeling it's going to be that way.

It truly is all connected, folks. And I find no greater joy than in seeing and sharing that, one blooming thing at a time.

Transfiguring the World with Scissors and Glue

2010-12-31T13:52:00.000-07:00

Making collages is something I have greatly enjoyed doing for years. I love the whole process, the intuitiveness and magic of it. I love making meaning out of randomness, taking images that seem to have nothing to do with each other and interlacing them.

I don't consider myself an Artist, and it's unlikely that my collages would ever be gallery quality, but their value to me is greater than any fine work of art. I love it when other people appreciate them, but unlike my writing, they are made mainly for my own viewing. I do enjoy sharing them though, and especially turning people on to the joys of collage-making. If you've never done it, give it a try!

I start by picking a theme and motifs; it has to be something fairly loose so that I'll be open to what unexpected images reveal themselves. The collage I started yesterday afternoon and finished this morning is my 2011 collage, with the primary themes/motifs of the color green and its associations, the heart, earth and air.

I also choose a background "canvas" right away too, as it will obviously determine how many images I can use, but it defines the collage in other ways too. I've done several collages on mirrors, for instance. I did one on a piece of a brown paper grocery bag, which I then burned around the edges. I think I want to get into shadow boxes next, try some 3D stuff. The only 3D collage I've ever done was actually more like a mosaic and was on a pencil box. I used keys and large glass beads, and pennies.

Next I heft a stack of magazines, and sometimes old books and calendars, to my bedroom, most of which I choose randomly, but with my themes in mind I might deliberately pick some types that will be more likely to contain related images. I then try to stick to only the stack I've chosen, although at the end of the process, if there's a gap in the collage that needs filling by something of a particular color or size, I might go look at a few others. I didn't have to do that this time, though.

The stack I ended up with consisted of many copies of Oprah's magazine, a couple of Vogues, a jewelry-maker's catalogue, a little book about Zen called The Art of Happiness, a couple of New Mexico magazines, a couple of issues each of National Geographic, Spirituality & Health, and Garden Design, a tiny book called Roman Wisdom, and one copy of Martha Stewart's Living.

I love the indulgence of closing myself in my room and flipping through magazines with scissors in hand. A friend once gave me an X-Acto knife for collage use as a gift; I gave it a try but found that I much more enjoy using scissors, and I'm pretty darn good with them.

So I cut out a bunch of stuff I think might work, and once I've gone through all the magazines I start laying out pieces on the background. It's really like putting a puzzle together, and I'm always amazed how certain things fit together as though they were made for each other. Other pieces are trickier, and sometimes I have to just put one aside and realize it's not going to work. But if there's a piece I really want in there, I'll find a way to fit it.

This is what my bedroom looks like when I'm in the middle of a collage:

Once it's all arranged the way I want, I usually leave it overnight. I think of this as a steeping or gelling process. The pieces need time to get to know each other and see if they're going to ultimately be compatible. And I need to be able to come back to it with fresh eyes.

Then the gluing begins. This is the trickiest part, because the puzzle can become extremely intricate, where several pieces have to be joined very precisely or they won't blend in a way that looks organic. And so a big part of this step is figuring out what order everything needs to be glued in. I have tried different glues, but always use good old glue sticks these days, because they cause the least possible amount of air bubbles and wrinkles. They're also easier and less messy.

Once it's done, I'll prop it up somewhere and gaze at it for a ridiculously long time. Then I'll go have a cup of coffee or something, and come back and gaze some more. I begin to see patterns I hadn't intended. I tell myself a story about it, interpret it. In the past few years I have more consciously created collages as a sort of prophecy, a picture of my intentions. It's rather like spellcasting, really; or prayer. And then the finished collage becomes an ongoing meditation as well as a way of tracking my progress. There is a poetry and fluidity and mystery to a collage that opens me into deep self-discovery. The meaning sometimes seems to make itself. To make me.

The collage below I made shortly after my 13-year-old son was born. It hangs in my living room and I still muse upon it: where I was then, where I am now, what has been fulfilled, what is timeless and essential in it and becomes more obviously so over time.

One of my favorite collages because it was so fun and felt so deliciously subversive to do was on a print of Van Gogh's Starry Night. I call it The Starry Kosmos.

And here's the one I finished today. Out of all my collages, I think this one inspires the most joy in me to look at.

The End of the Orange

2010-12-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

So wow. After months of being mostly absent from the blogosphere, this will be my third post in the past week or so. Why? Because a) my van has been in the shop for two weeks and I've been mostly housebound, b) teaching for the semester is over and I'm on break from grantwriting this week, and last but most certainly not least c) I'm actually inspired to write again. (Well, let me clarify that: I'm inspired to write my OWN stuff again. Since I write a weekly column now, most of my writing juice goes to that and I find little left for my personal writing. Not that I'm complaining; I LOVE writing my column.)

This is the third year in a row that I've felt a strong sense of inspiration and magic in the post-Christmas season. Last year, my immersion in the blogging community greatly enhanced that. For one thing, I was turned on to the idea of picking a word for the year to reflect on, and that evolved into also picking a color. (Although it really felt like the color picked me.)

Now I'm coming to the end of my orange year of "quiet love" (yes - I picked two words instead of one). I have discovered that for 2011 my word will be "bless," and the color will be green, and I'm so excited to begin this new journey that I've been consciously restraining myself from jumping ahead too fast. I want to properly finish the old year before I throw myself completely into the new. I want to make sure I've really learned the year's lessons, integrated its spirit, before I march off on a new adventure. And so I'm reflecting more on the orange nature of the past year than I have in a while, letting the orange seep into my soul and steep there for these last few days of 2010. It's been wonderful to be able to go back to old blog posts and track my path. I clicked on "orange" in my labels section and went back and read those posts, and am gratified to see that the directions I felt led by my orange ruminations bore fruit.

For instance, I wrote the following in one of those posts: "What happens when the second chakra [whose color is orange] is too open (overly emotionally reactive, too absorptive of others' emotions) and too closed (shut down, apathetic, cold) both fit me. I go back and forth between these states." Well, I'm thrilled to report that this year has found me finally balanced in this regard.

I also wrote: "I need to be able to feel the people around me without drowning in it or shutting myself down when it's all too much. I need a vibrancy and vitality that flows out of me and doesn't just get stuck in my head." I have actually learned this year to tap into such a flowing vibrancy and vitality within myself, which is exactly what has gotten me unstuck out of my head and brought balance between being too open and too closed.

Hallelujah!

May your old year end in peace and your new one begin with inspiration!

The orange flower lights June Amber gave me for my birthday this past year

The Journey of the Three Giant Aliens

2010-12-28T11:46:00.000-07:00

On the day after Christmas, I ventured into a big box McStore to take advantage of 50% off on all holiday items. I was specifically looking for wise men, because my nativity set is lacking these, and I've been trying to find some for years, but they never seem to be "sold separately." I've seen many wonderful nativity sets that include wise men, and have often been tempted to just get a new one, but the one I have, while not the finest to be had, has great sentimental value to me, as I've had it since childhood.

Here it is, in all its plastic, badly-painted glory:

You may notice that we added a nursing cow a couple of years ago. This was when June Amber was going through a cow phase, and it just seemed appropriate to have a mama and her calf at the nativity. You may also notice that under the angel's outstretched foot is evidence of a roof fire. This was from the year that I placed a candle just a little too far inside the stable.

What you do not see here is wise men (or shepherds, for that matter). So joy of joys! I found three individually sold wise men between the big red bows and the four-packs of plastic Santa cups. It was even worth waiting behind a woman and her young child who held up the checkout line for a price check on a singing Justin Bieber doll.

So here they are, set up on my dining table and on their way to the manger:

Aren't they handsome?

When I got them home and started playing with them, I noticed this on their (literal not figurative) bottoms:

The fact that they're from China made me wonder where my own nativity set is from, and lo and behold, I inspected it and discovered it's actually from Depose, Italy. Huh.

But what really interested me on this label is the whole concept of the difference between a "decoration" and a "toy," and why the manufacturers felt it necessary to make such a distinction. Are there only two categories for what these figures can be? And what does that even mean, that they should be used ONLY for decoration and not for playing?

After I took the above photos, June Amber came home, and she played with them too, and accidentally knocked one over, resulting in his hand being broken off at the wrist. Now the "not a toy" warning made some sense.

I decided not to glue the hand back on because it seemed fitting to me that during a long and arduous pilgrimage, there would be such trial and loss. If you take Eliot's The Journey of the Magi to heart, a much deeper brokenness was experienced by the wise men. And at least it wasn't the hand he was using to carry his gift to the Christ child.

Other than that, there was really only one minor issue with my beautiful new magi - they are not quite to the scale of everyone else at the manger. They are, in fact, twice as big as Mary and Joseph. But I figure that's okay, because they were supposed to be from a strange land anyway, so who says they couldn't have been giants? (Although I suppose if they're from China, that would be unlikely.) Also, if you look at it from their perspective of distance, it works.

Only when they reach the stable on Epiphany, will their size seem shocking, and perhaps that's as it should be. Besides, with a giant benevolent Santa watching over the whole thing, it's all relative.

Saying Yes to the Impossible

2010-12-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

Because my free time has been very limited over the past months, and because I am now writing for a living, I have been spending far more time on Facebook than on Blogger. When I'm sitting at my computer, working on an article or a grant, I can flip over to Facebook for a five minute break, and happily, I've been able to keep up with some of my blogging friends this way. One of those friends is Claire, of A Seat at the Table. Today she has shared several wonderful ruminations on Advent and Christmas, which I have been so inspired by that I had to come blog about it, even though a huge pile of laundry, an unwritten article, and unbaked goodies await my attention.

One of the links she shared was a post called Annunciations All the Time, at dotMagis. The author shares the poem, "Annunciation," by Denise Levertov (one of my favorite poets). This poem deals with the idea that we are always being presented with things to say "yes" to the way Mary said yes to the angel. And this brought me back to something I've been ruminating about this Advent, which is the part of Mary's 'yes' that included giving birth away from home, in a stable (or cave, as I hear is more accurate).

It seems to me that if an angel came to me and told me I was going to give birth to the son of God, saying yes would be a no-brainer. But then if the time came to give birth and I found myself far from home and family, in a dirty stable, I'd be questioning if it really was God after all. I'd be thinking, "This can't be right, this can't be the way such a one should be born."

Last year, I blogged about the messiness of Christmas. This year, I am deeper in the messiness, not just of Christmas but of life. How is it that my most cherished notions of the way things should be can be so far from reality? It helps me to think of Mary in the stable, saying Yes.

Claire shared another poem by Denise Levertov, on her own blog today, and this one is about the importance of welcoming grief when it comes. I can't help but put this together with my Mary rumination. When we think of grief, we usually think of the big losses, of people we love dying, but there are so many little losses. So many. And some losses we experience as big even when they might not seem so to others. I think again of Mary in the stable, of reconciling with the loss of an imagined experience of giving birth surrounded by the comfort and familiarity of home and loved ones. For me, this would likely bring a sense of great loss, and I would grieve. For Mary, it was the introduction to a life of losses around her son. And for all of us with children, we know that the moment we give birth, we begin to lose them.

To allow grief is to say yes to the loss that has caused the grief, and then to open up a new and more abundant set of possibilities. This is what I continue to learn at deeper and deeper levels, or actually, in more and more circumstances, even the ones that have seemed impossible to accept.

The third link Claire has shared today is to a post called The Christmas We Are Waiting For, by Sister Joan Chittister, and it reflects upon the Advent theme of waiting. Chittister comments that Christ's birth was really about establishing a whole new order, which in many ways, disappointed those who were waiting for a Messiah. She asks, "For what have we been waiting...For the restoration of the old order or for the creation of the new?"

The creation of the new may be very different from what I had imagined and thought right, and I will grieve the loss of the old, but doing so may be the only way to really let go of it and welcome true freedom, peace, and joy.

May we all be awake to the blessings of the season, in whatever messy form they come.

Vision Statement

2010-11-14T19:43:00.000-07:00

I have been pondering vision. This is largely because I got contact lenses a week ago, and because of who I got them from. There's a vision care office in Taos called RealEyes, which, at my editor's suggestion, I recently wrote about for my newspaper column. You can read that here. From the inspiring conversation I had with Dr. Ratzlaff and his wife Fiona, I decided make them my eye care providers.

I wore contact lenses from the age of 14 until I was pregnant with my first child at 23. Since your eyes change shape when you're pregnant, contacts became too uncomfortable, and I just never went back to them. But now I'm ready for a change. I'm tired of glasses, of the weight on my face, of the tiny little field of vision. (And part of it is vanity, I'll admit, although glasses have sometimes afforded me the "sexy librarian" compliment.)

Dr. Ratzlaff told me things I've never heard from an eye doctor in the 33 years I've been wearing glasses. One fascinating thing he told me was that with correction my eyes are much better than 20/20, which apparently is pretty unusual. And then he said that with my current prescription I was actually overcorrected, which is not such a great thing.

So now I have contact lenses, and my prescription is slightly weaker, and it's like living in a different world. I'm so used to being able to see at great distances that it's strange, for instance, to be driving and not be able to read all the faraway signs. During my followup appointment, I found out that even with the weaker prescription, I still have 20/15 vision. I had always thought that 20/20 equaled "perfect," but it turns out there is no such thing as perfect vision.

Because you always end up sacrificing something.

If you can see at great distances, you generally don't see as well close up, and vice versa. So by having great distance vision with a stronger prescription, I was straining when reading and such, and ultimately weakening and stressing my eyes.

I can tell the difference now. In the normal range of vision of say, a space the size of an average room, I can see much more clearly and my eyes feel more relaxed. It's also very nice to not feel like I'm looking at things through a small window. So in this sense, my world is bigger, more immediate. (And things that are right in front of me appear almost startlingly larger. I went shoe shopping the day I got my contacts, and they all looked too huge to possibly fit my feet, but then I'd pick up a pair and they'd be two sizes too small.) But in terms of the world-at-large - well, it's less large, at least the sharp edges of it.

This is not a complaint. My point is that it's fascinating to see from yet another perspective, another angle, how relative and subjective the experience of being alive in the world is. To confirm to myself yet again how on the one hand, the least little shifts in circumstances can have a great effect, and on the other, how it makes no difference at all to how I feel at the deepest level. Does being able to clearly see my legs while I'm shaving them in the bathtub make my experience of taking a bath better? Yes and no.

The real question is, does being able to see my body clearly make me inhabit it more fully? Does clearer vision make me more present? Does improving my physical vision make my spiritual vision clearer? I don't necessarily have any articulate answers, but these are the questions I'm holding at the moment. This is the adventure I'm on.

One of the things that Dr. Ratzlaff eagerly talked about during our interview, and that totally sold me on him, was how the eyes are an extension of the brain. When he later did my eye exam, he commented on the saying, "The eyes are the window of the soul." It's true not only on a metaphorical level, but in the sense that when the pupil is dilated and the doctor shines a light into it, he can see the blood vessels in the eye; he's literally seeing into the person. He pointed out that this is the only time you can look directly at blood vessels without cutting a person open. I had never thought about it that way.

Because I'm a grant writer, I'm also now thinking about the meaning of a "vision statement." And because I'm a poet, I'm thinking about how that would apply metaphorically to my life. Do I have a personal vision statement to make and stick to?

According to Wikipedia, a vision statement "defines the desired or intended future state of an organization or enterprise in terms of its fundamental objective and/or strategic direction. Vision is a long term view, sometimes describing how the organization would like the world in which it operates to be. For example a charity working with the poor might have a vision statement which read "A world without poverty."

My immediate response when I ask myself what my vision statement would be is "To see and love what is." Which is never about the future. It's a goal in terms of "distance" of depth, not of time or space. My "desired or intended future" is to be fully, deeply in the present. My "fundamental objective" is to not be attached to objectives. My "strategic direction" is within. The world in which I'd like to operate could be described as "beautiful, interesting, kind, and intimate." And when I am fully, deeply present, seeing and loving what is, that is the world I get. So.

I also need to tell you the green colander story, without which this post would not be complete. Without further ado:

The Green Colander Story

The colander I had before the green one was, frankly, crap. It was too big, and it had slots that were too big, so that whenever you drained spaghetti in it, half of the noodles slipped through into the sink.

So I told the universe that I needed a new colander, and found this cute little green one at a thrift store for a dollar. It was perfect. And I loved that it was green.

And then one day I went to pull it out of the cabinet to drain some potatoes for mashing, and it was gone. I looked everywhere for it, even out in the yard, thinking my three-year-old may have absconded with it, but alas, it was nowhere to be found. For two or three weeks, every time I had to use that other big stupid colander, I'd ask whoever was around, "Are you SURE you didn't do something with that green colander?" And they'd all say no. Because why in the world would anyone make off with a colander?

Until one day, while I was searching in the refrigerator for something, I noticed the overripe apples a friend had brought me. I had rinsed them and put them in the fridge, planning to eventually make applesauce in the crockpot. And there they still were, right in the middle of the middle shelf of the fridge, two or three weeks later, right where I'd left and totally forgotten about them. In my beloved green colander.

Sheesh.

I doubt there is a need for me to point out the significance of this story. But you can believe I've been pondering it ever since. Although I still haven't made applesauce.

Setting Scraps of Light on Fire

2010-09-17T20:56:00.000-06:00

Scraps of light through the adobe ruins next to the grove

Today is my one year blogoversary. It is this and only this that has finally gotten me to sit down and write a post. I have missed blogging and think about it almost every day, but my life has become so full of other things that I haven't had the inspiration. To find some, I walked over to the church today, but there were too many people around so I ended up in the grove, where I sat and wrote this post by hand. I have found myself sitting in the grove more often lately than in the church courtyard. It's green again, although the mass graves of trees are still untended.

So much has happened since I last posted, that I don't know where to begin. Should I tell you about my busy life? The immense sense of loss and sadness I've been feeling? Should I talk about how disconnected I've become from my writing?

Or maybe I should try to be more positive, and tell you about my discoveries about bats, or the white cat I keep seeing, or my lemon tree dream. But all these things are moments that have passed, inspirations that have faded in the face of too much work.

I'm not happy. I know I need to just accept the way my life is right now, surrender to it. Believe me, I'm working on that moment by moment, but there is a very sad little girl inside me who wants to come out and play. And I don't know what to tell her to make her stop banging on the door.

And I realize how much I miss you all, my blogging friends. It's not only the writing that I miss, it's the community, the support. I feel very alone in my life these days, very much like I'm carrying a heavy burden by myself. Stumbling and faltering under it.

But life goes on, and I just keep taking the next step. At times I have glimpses of all this as a journey of significance, but mostly it just feels like stumbling in the dark. I get tired of trying to hang onto the scraps of light that are tossed me. I get mad at God for not giving me more, and then I'm ashamed for feeling that way.

And that's why I need - NEED - to write about those scraps, because it's the only way for me to hold onto them as guides, as reminders of the greater journey, the better story. I need to tell you about last week when I had both a butterfly and a dragonfly on my finger in the same day. They were both trapped in my house at different points, and I freed them.

I need to tell you about dreaming of a sugarlaced lemon tree so glorious that gazing up into it was like eating the sun.

I need to tell you about the lessons bats have been trying to teach me about surrender and rebirth, about echolocation, in which bats navigate in the dark by using their voices to create sounds that reverberate off objects - the ability to see with the ears, to hear with the voice. Because by telling you, I have a greater chance of really learning the lessons, internalizing and integrating them. I too hear with my voice. I learn by teaching.

And now, just by writing all this, I feel lighter, happier, inspired, free. It occurs to me that this post follows a similar structure to some of the biblical psalms that start out with a lament and end with praise because by writing the lament the psalmist has seen the joy again.

Now I see that the writing I haven't been doing had hardened around me like ice, that scraps of light left unshared leave me cold, and once that happens, I have to write into the cold to break through it.

The fire must be tended or it dies out. The fire must be fed, and for me that means writing it.

Bellamy Brothers - Let Your Love Flow

2010-08-15T10:22:00.000-06:00

Bittersweet Harvest

2010-08-01T14:20:00.000-06:00


Justin, Ben, and Harry in Mexico. I met them shortly after this trip.

The house in Las Vegas, New Mexico that I moved into after I split up with my husband was next to a compound inhabited by three men: Harry, Ben, and Justin, and I became very close to all of them. In fact, Justin eventually became my partner and the father of my fourth child. Harry was in his mid-sixties when I met him, but had the health and energy level of someone much younger. He was a forest firefighter and a pilot, and had lived in many places and done many things. At one point in his life he was a successful stock broker. He was wise, funny, strong, and a great cook, famous for his amazing pots of beans.

Two days before Eliana was born, he got up that morning, and something wasn't right. We all thought he was drunk at first, but soon realized he had had a stroke. We brought him to the hospital where he stayed for several days. He and I were in there at the same time, I giving birth, and he beginning a slow process of death.

When he was released, he wasn't much better than when he went in. The stroke had completely transformed him, he had turned into an old man overnight. He was disoriented and couldn't do simple things for himself. I would go visit him, and he'd have his glasses on upside down, or his shirt on inside out. A few days after his return home, he reached into his woodstove and grabbed a smouldering log with his bare hand, severely burning it. I became the tender of that wound, changing the dressing twice a day. I was simultaneously caring for a newborn and a wounded old man, and it was hard.

Harry eventually got a little better in terms of greater clarity and ability to do for himself, but never again returned to the man he had been.

I eventually left Las Vegas and did so with great relief to be ending a dark period of my life. I had gone through a couple of years in which I suffered a major identity crisis, and allowed myself to be drawn into a downward spiral of reckless behavior. This resulted in the loss of several friends, and even after I began rebuilding my life in a healthier direction, the views of certain people about me were set, so that I found myself trapped in the mirror, so to speak. So after I left Las Vegas, I never looked back, I blocked it out of my consciousness as much as possible, and didn't go back to visit Harry or anyone else.

Last Wednesday, Harry killed himself with a rifle. It had gotten to the point where there was discussion about putting him in a home. That just wasn't going to happen. I don't blame him, but it doesn't make it any easier. It didn't make it easier to go to Las Vegas, or to walk in the room where it happened. It didn't make it easier to clean brains off the wall, or to deal with the flood of memories that overtook me when I saw the white electric heater he had in there, that used to be my daughter's and was covered in exuberantly adolescent graffiti-like phrases she had written in black Sharpie.

Going to Las Vegas the other day was an intense opening to many things that I have been so closed to, so numb against. Things related to my relationship with Justin, things that happened with my children while I was there, all the good and bad memories of living there, of who I was then. And I realized to my shame that after Harry had his stroke, I detached from him because it was too hard to see how he'd changed, to suffer the loss of the amazing man he was. I was always afraid I would betray the dismay I felt around him. And honestly, after I left, it was as though I'd already written him off. I kept expecting to hear that he'd died and I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did. For a man like Harry, living in dependency on friends, doctors, pills, was no life at all.

I want to remember him as he was before the stroke, his gruff voice with that slight Texas drawl, the way he'd call you darlin'. I see him driving down the road in his big black and red rescue Jeep, wearing one of those crisp white shirts he loved. I remember how despite his ability to lead a team of firefighters, he was afraid of bugs. How he mentored June Amber, my oldest daughter, during a difficult time for her. But I also want to remember who he was after the stroke, and honor that person too. Because he hung in there, he fought the good fight until the end.

Today is Lammas, the pagan celebration of the first harvest, the harvest of the grain. According to schooloftheseasons.com, it is a festival of regrets and farewells, and this is very fitting for me today, because I am experiencing a true regret, that I let my emotional difficulties prevent me from staying in relationship with someone who was very dear to me and is now gone.

And yet, my overriding feeling is one of gratitude, that Harry lived and that he's free, that I have been brought full-circle to face and integrate my Las Vegas life and its people, to soften my heart and open to love in a place that has been cold and dark within me for several years. To forgive myself and others. To say a fond farewell - to Harry, to my regret, to past mistakes, both mine and others.'

One of the traditions associated with Lammas is baking bread, making good use of that which has been harvested. So today, as I consider all that I am now reaping from my relationship with Harry, from my life in Las Vegas and all that I did there, all that I can now make good use of instead of regret, I will bake a loaf of bread in honor of Harry's life, and bring it to Las Vegas when I go for his memorial next weekend, to share with others who were connected to his life, and to mine.

Harry, Eliana, Justin, me, and June Amber in California, Summer '08

At the Crossroads

2010-07-25T12:55:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of pilgrimage lately. It has been one of those themes that starts coming to me from several different directions at once until I find myself viewing it from a number of interesting angles.

During the writers' conference that I participated in a couple of weeks ago, I had a major epiphany about my relationship with the San Francisco de Asis church. From my very first post about it, I used the word "pilgrimage" to describe what I was doing in walking over there. I said it was like taking a little daily pilgrimage, but what I've now realized is it's not a series of small pilgrimages, but only one, a long and profound one. It's not a long journey in terms of physical distance but of time and moving through layers to an essential core.

And today on Claire's blog, her post is titled "Pilgrimage as Inner Journey," and astoundingly connects with my own experience and thoughts. She starts the post with a pilgrim's prayer, and one of the phrases that really jumped out at me was the plea for "a guide at the crossroads." Because a crossroads is exactly where I am.

Ever since the writers' conference I have been dealing with the sense of moving to a deeper level with my relationship to the St. Francis church and the book I'm writing about it. The piece I submitted for the conference workshop was woven together from various blog posts about the church, and the thematic thread I used was that of nakedness. Some of you may remember my post last fall called "Naked in the Town Square." I drew out the theme from that post to encompass the whole piece, and found it developing in my heart and mind as I did so. Today in Claire's post, she talks about inner pilgrimage as a process in which she hands over to God all her life, both inner and outer, a process which feels like "stripping bare."

I am naked at the crossroads right now, because the conference made me realize that this book I'm writing is no longer hypothetical - I'm really doing it, and that process means getting more deeply involved with the church. It occurred to me that it's time to talk to the priests and let them know what I'm doing, that it's only respectful to do so. And also that one of my desires is to weave journalistic writing in with my memoir-ish stuff, and in order to do that I must connect with actual members of the church, get to know them, interview them. It's time to move beyond the courtyard and enter the building, the body. And this frightens me, for a number of reasons: Fear of approaching people I don't know, doubt of myself having the "right" to be writing this book, boldness to claim that I'm doing so, putting myself and my writing out there to be scrutinized by people who have been members of the church all their lives. Naked, naked, naked, in the stark light of day. It would be so much easier to keep sitting in the courtyard with the hummingbird moths.

But honestly, the thing that frightens me most is in how I will be altered by deepening my relationship with this church. I fear that I will be swept away, lose myself to it. I have been flirting with the church, and now I'm confronted with the choice to make a commitment that I have no idea where it will lead.

Claire speaks of pilgrimage as a time of testing and says, "There is always a moment when it gets too much." And to continue beyond this point requires surrender. This is the crossroads where I now find myself. Will I, as Claire puts it, allow the path I'm walking to "walk me?" Even as I write this though, I realize it already is, even though I still have strong resistance.

Just now the church bells began ringing, calling the people to worship. Today is the feast day of Santiago, and the annual Taos fiestas honoring this saint are in full swing downtown. Hearing the bells, I feel an aching longing to be at the mass, but fear holds me back. I'm not Catholic and I don't know how to do things like enter the pew and even if I did I would feel like a fake going through those movements. I don't know the words spoken and sung during mass that Catholics know by heart, many of which are in Spanish, which I don't speak. I don't know if they have childcare for Eliana or if I'm supposed to keep her with me, and I'm too afraid to ask. And so I don't go. I sit here and write about it instead.

Interestingly, the specific pilgrimage Claire refers to is the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and she writes of currently being elsewhere in the world, missing that place, knowing that today there is a huge celebration of the saint for which it's named.

An amazing thing that came to me through the conference was in a discussion I had with one of the other participants who said she sensed that my deepest connecting point with the church is through St. Clare, not only in terms of the statue in the courtyard that I love, but also her story, that this woman perceived wants to be told and lived through me. So today I am thankful to both my Cla(i)res for being my guides at the crossroads, and the awesomeness of this interlacing is not lost on me.

The name, Cla(i)re, of course, is related to clarity and light. I have many photos of the statue of Clare in which she is framed by incredible clouds. This is the metaphor I turn to today. Recently I closely inspected an iron cross in the courtyard that I had never paid much attention to before. I discovered that there is a Latin inscription on it, "Occurrent nubes," which Googling led me to learn means, "Clouds will intervene." I love the mystery of this, I love that I can look at the clouds of my own doubt and fear and see how they interfere with my clear direction, but also in some way contribute to the overall pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is not a straight walk from here to there. Clouds refract light into variegated beauty. They soften the harsh light that exposes nakedness. They intervene on behalf of clarity if I only pay attention and keep walking the path, however haltingly.

Just an Update

2010-07-06T15:51:00.000-06:00

First, I must apologize for my appalling lack of presence in the blogosphere of late. I have been so crazybusy with other endeavors that I haven't even been reading, let alone commenting, on blogs very much. At this point, I've pretty much accepted that it's just going to be like this for a while, maybe until fall. But I do miss you all.

So why have I been so busy, you may ask? Well, I'm working on a twelve-page manuscript for the Taos Summer Writers' Conference, which I'll be attending all next week. The manuscript is a piece about my relationship with the San Francisco de Asis church, which I'm writing a book about.

I'm also in the middle of several grants with looming deadlines, and I've had two sets of houseguests in the past couple of weeks.

But the news I really want to share is that I'm now co-writing a weekly column for The Taos News, called "Innovators & Entrepreneurs," profiling local businesses. Turns out joining the Chamber of Commerce was a really wise move, as this is how I got the gig. My first article was published last Thursday, and can be viewed here. I love love love doing this column!

So that's pretty much it for now - I just wanted to let you all know that I haven't forgotten about you or your wonderful blogs, and I look forward to catching up on them all when my life slows down again. I hope you all are having a wonderful summer (or winter, depending where you are).

Graffiti and Roses

2010-06-21T19:41:00.000-06:00

Today is the Summer Solstice, and what that immediately conjures in my mind is Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and a vague longing for romance and the ocean.

But I am single, and nowhere near the ocean. I was hoping to visit the west coast this summer, but chose instead to put money into a writer's conference that will be happening here in Taos. (Have I mentioned that I'm writing a book about my relationship with the San Francisco de Asis church?) My heart right now is very much with the Gulf Coast, and so at this Solstice time of great light and life, I am permeated with the awareness of darkness and death. I feel it in my own body.

Today is also Honoring Sacred Sites day, and so I send my light and life to the Gulf Coast, the sacred ocean. And I turn, as I do every day, toward the San Francisco de Asis church, the sacred site right outside my door.

Taos is a tourist town, and each summer a theme is chosen to center activities and events around. Last year it was "The Summer of Love," and the focus was on Taos' strong and enduring hippie culture. Dennis Hopper came for the opening of his art show. This year the theme is "Return to Sacred Places." In fact, the newspaper held an essay contest for Taos residents around this theme, and I got an honorable mention for my essay about the church.

Because of this theme, there has been a lot of focus on the St. Francis church, with talks given and three art shows around town. I missed the talk that was given at the public library on June 5, but was lucky enough to catch it on the radio the other night. The thing that most struck me in this talk, given by David Maes, who is a lifelong resident of Ranchos de Taos and member of the church, was in his introduction. He spoke of how the church belongs to anyone who experiences its sacredness, and how even the air around the church feels holy and refreshing.

I did not participate in enjarre, the annual remudding, which is now over. There is a variety of reasons for that, but one of the most unexpected ones was the sense of loss I've been experiencing over the cutting down of trees in the grove by the church. It left a bad taste in my mouth and made me want to stay away from the church altogether. It was several days after seeing all the stumps before I could go back, and when I did, the stumps had all been overturned so that the whole space resembles a twisted wasteland.

The next time I went, a few days after that, I discovered that the entrance to the grove between the gift shop and rectory was now defined with edging and filled with gravel.

I have to admit I'm having trouble with these changes. A little bit of wildness has been tamed. I don't think the birds are happy about it either. The doves have been completely silent and the crows have sounded so angry lately. They've been congregating and having screechfests in my yard. I know I've mentioned the birdlife at the church before but I want to give you a clearer picture of this. It's really only been in the past month or two that I've realized how central the church is to the bird communities of Ranchos de Taos. There are more birds in this part of Taos than any other, and what I finally realized is that the church is their crossroads, their center. They fly back and forth, in and out from that hub. Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems like there's been less bird traffic since enjarre began.

And I can't help but wonder how St. Francis would feel about all this. One of the things he was famous for was going around and restoring rundown churches, but I wonder how far he took that, balanced against his intense reverence for Mother Earth and her creatures. Sigh. Well, what's done is done, and there is nothing for me to do but accept and integrate these changes, and continue to simply observe them. One thing I do like is the new sign that marks the entrance to the grove from the church side:

The grove is still in flux. Orange fencing surrounds the area near the adobe ruins that borders the grove, and certain spaces are marked out in a way that suggest something is planned. Perhaps I've never mentioned the ruins before. It's hard to give you the scope of it with my simple camera, but here's a try:

It's not the Parthenon, but there is still something sacred in this to me, even or perhaps especially in the graffiti. There is a sacredness in the way we leave our artful marks on things. I love the way recent generations have come up with ways to do this even in urban landscapes. Graffiti, skateboarding, and parkour are all ways to use and add to the mundane and manmade in elevated ways, turning the utilitarian into the artful, for the sheer joy of it. (I must mention here that I love the concept of Tess' blog, Sacred Graffiti; I highly recommend you visit there.)

After some inquiry at the gift shop, I discovered that the activity around the ruins is because an archaeology group is doing excavation. When the church was first built, it was surrounded by a fort, and the buildings later became private residences, many of which are still occupied. Since those buildings hold a lot of history, it makes sense that an archaeology group would be interested in the ruins.

On the other side of the ruins is the church lot, a deep contrast in its manicured beauty. Now that things have calmed down a bit over there, I've been able to settle in and enjoy it again. Today, a man was revarnishing the benches in the courtyard.

I love to see the seasonal changes over there. The flowers that the hawkmoths come to aren't blooming yet, but the rose bushes are in full bloom, something I missed last year because I didn't start walking to the church until after the blossoms had faded.

Clare, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and their roses. Notice the ruins in the background.

I'm thinking about the pruning metaphor again in terms of manmade changes versus "natural" ones. I once had a student who wrote an astonishing paper using Emerson's ideas about nature to back up the claim that everything humans do is natural. Is the grove-clearing and throwing down of gravel as natural and beautiful as any seasonal change of the flora? My instinctive resistance to this idea is based on the fear that if we believe that, it gives us license to do all kinds of real damage, just the way that verses from Genesis about mankind having "dominion" over Creation have been used to justify all sort of horrible nonsense. And yet, partially thanks to that student's paper, and also Byron Katie's teachings, I can't help but wonder: If we consciously saw things in this way would it not ultimately give us a greater, not a lesser, awareness and sense of responsibility in our interactions with the natural world? In fact, we would no longer see ourselves as being separate enough to have "interactions with" the natural world, but would know ourselves to be part of the organic whole.

I don't know. If I've learned anything in my four decades here on Earth, it's that it's a long road from ideology to integration. But on this Solstice day of honoring sacred sites, it feels like an appropriate rumination. Graffiti and roses, skateboarding and birdflight, excavation and pollination, pruning, enjarre, restoration, decomposition - my former student would say these things are equal to each other, equally natural. What has always appealed most to me about the St. Francis church, which is the most sacred place in the world to me, is the dance among nature, culture, spirituality, religion, art, tradition. And the paradoxes in all of it, the paradox in my relationship to it as an intimate outsider.

What better way to honor the seasonal changes of nature and sacred sites both "natural" and manmade than to perceive ourselves as fully integrated with and responsible for them the way we are responsible for our own selves? This is also National Prayer Day, and the only prayer I have is for this, and then to rest in the holy paradoxes, the mysteries to be integrated within and beyond our ideologies.

We Are All Spiritual Leaders

2010-06-16T12:49:00.000-06:00

The following was forwarded to me from the pastor of the Presbyterian church I've attended here in Taos. I pass it along to you for your consideration, and I would like to suggest, especially in response to Jennifer's comment on my last post, that we pray together, in whatever way is meaningful to each of us, in the spirit of what is written here. Chief Arvol speaks of World Peace and Prayer Day/Honoring Sacred Sites Day on June 21. I propose that any of you who feel called to do so, honor a site that is sacred to you on your blog that day.

May 12, 2010

A Great Urgency: To All World Religious and Spiritual Leaders

My Relatives,

Time has come to speak to the hearts of our Nations and their Leaders. I ask you this from the bottom of my heart, to come together from the Spirit of your Nations in prayer.

We, from the heart of Turtle Island, have a great message for the World; we are guided to speak from all the White Animals showing their sacred color, which have been signs for us to pray for the sacred life of all things. As I am sending this message to you, many Animal Nations are being threatened, those that swim, those that crawl, those that fly, and the plant Nations, eventually all will be affect from the oil disaster in the Gulf.

The dangers we are faced with at this time are not of spirit. The catastrophe that has happened with the oil spill which looks like the
bleeding of Grandmother Earth, is made by human mistakes, mistakes that we cannot afford to continue to make.

I asked, as Spiritual Leaders, that we join together, united in prayer with the whole of our Global Communities. My concern is these serious issues will continue to worsen, as a domino effect that our Ancestors have warned us of in their Prophecies.

I know in my heart there are millions of people that feel our united prayers for the sake of our Grandmother Earth are long overdue. I believe we as Spiritual people must gather ourselves and focus our thoughts and prayers to allow the healing of the many wounds that have been inflicted on the Earth.

As we honor the Cycle of Life, let us call for Prayer circles globally to assist in healing Grandmother Earth (our Unc¹I Maka).

We ask for prayers that the oil spill, this bleeding, will stop. That the winds stay calm to assist in the work. Pray for the people to be guided in repairing this mistake, and that we may also seek to live in harmony, as we make the choice to change the destructive path we are on.

As we pray, we will fully understand that we are all connected. And that what we create can have lasting effects on all life.

So let us unite spiritually, All Nations, All Faiths, One Prayer. Along with this immediate effort, I also ask to please remember June 21st, World Peace and Prayer Day/Honoring Sacred Sites day. Whether it is a natural site, a temple, a church, a synagogue or just your own sacred space, let us make a prayer for all life, for good decision making by our Nations, for our children¹s future and well-being, and the generations to come.

Onipikte (that we shall live),

Chief Arvol Looking Horse
19th generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe
http://www.Wolakota.org


Chief Arvol Looking Horse, by indeed_2006

The Ruthless Gardener

2010-06-12T09:58:00.000-06:00

Bell near St. Clare's statue in the San Francisco de Asis courtyard

As I continue to practice dropping out of my mind and into my body, several interesting things have been occurring. One is that my normal state of intense study and research is becoming less normal. I simply don't have the same intensity of thinking, which also means less writing. I've been finding myself at a loss to even comment on all of your blogs. Even this post is more like an eruption than a coherent thought process.

At the same time, my level of physical activity has accelerated quite a bit. As I'm spending more time in my body than my head, really listening to it, I hear that it wants to move and work, for the sheer joy of it. I have taken up running with a zest I didn't know was possible. For most of my life, physical activity was something I thought about doing, felt like I should be doing, but didn't actually want to do. Now I look forward to it, and find myself having to temper my enthusiasm so I don't OVERdo it. I've also been working in the yard, gardening. I planted pumpkins, and they sprouted! My arms are sore today from pulling up weeds. There is an incredible level of satisfaction in all of this.

But nothing stays the same. I simply don't know from day to day what my perspective will be. It's as though things are shaking loose within me, swirling about, uprooted. I worked hard on trying to let go of a thing I wanted. That didn't work. So I started praying earnestly for that thing, something I'd never tried before. I prayed specifically and articulately every day with all my heart. Until I discovered I didn't really want what I was praying for. What a paradox - when I tried to not want it I wanted it more, and when I gave myself over to wanting it, I stopped wanting it.

Now the loud voice of wanting in my head is shrieking with rage because I've abandoned it and it doesn't have an anchor anymore. It's desperately trying to seek one, and I'm just watching and listening. Not judging, not giving in to its ludicrous demands, just seeing. Just hearing. Go ahead and rant and rave, I can't stop you anyway. I will just wait here in the quiet you can't touch until you diminish, which is already happening and is in fact the reason you're being so obnoxious, trying to cling to life.

Nothing stays the same. Everything shifts and sometimes that looks "wrong" or dangerous. "To enjarre or not to enjarre" got pushed way into the background this week because I got very sick. I won't go into the details, but I was showing exact symptoms of a pretty serious condition. However, by the time the doctor looked at me, the symptoms were gone and my tests came back fine. I'm convinced that I made myself sick by listening to the shrieking voice. I let it take me over for a couple of days, and became unguarded enough that the tumult of emotion that accompanied that rotten thinking caused something like an oil spill in my body.

When I finally felt better physically, and could listen to the shrieking without being taken over by it, I was eager to go for a run. It had been days since my enjarre encounter. I waited until evening so there would be no crowds at the church, since I was still not quite ready to deal with that challenge.

Nothing stays the same. Have I mentioned how very much I love the little grove by the church? Well, they cut down most of the trees. They only left the ones around the perimeter, but essentially, the grove is no longer. It's just an empty lot full of tree stumps. They took down the tire swing my son and his friend strung up with an old garden hose; in fact the tree it was hanging from is gone. I'm welling up with tears as I write this, as I did when I first saw it.

Nothing stays the same, but everything outward is reflected inwardly with an eternal tint. I think of the metaphor of pruning in John 15. Some prunings are bigger than others. Sometimes life is pruned so radically it's alarming, and doesn't fit my idea of how things "should" be. Do I really ultimately know what "health" means? Do I really know what is for the ultimate good of myself or the world?

Oil spills, sickness, destruction of trees. All ranting and raving is a wall of nothing against such things. These things happen, and I see them all together. I see in them meaning and connection that suggest a story I cannot fully tell. I hear in them only the call to awaken, the thunder of tremendous bells.

Jarred by Enjarre

2010-06-08T10:29:00.000-06:00

Notice the individual pieces of straw in the adobe.

The cloud formations just around sunset the other night were the most amazing and bizarre I've ever seen. I was sitting at the computer when I looked out the window and noticed the unusual quality of light outside. It had that otherworldly pink glow that sometimes happens when the sky is partly overcast and partly clear with a certain angle of the sun.

I put Eliana in the stroller and went out for a look-see. A layered variety of clouds in the west hovered above the setting sun. Some were sinewy and fetal, and these were superimposed with intense depth over what looked like calm waves on an ocean. The whole configuration appeared to be a world upside down.

As I walked down the street toward the grove, the sky was intensely blue in certain places, but the overall quality of light was orangy-pink, and within this, the arch of trees over the road appeared electric green. We walked slowly through the grove and I felt like I was dissolving into light and green, the scent of grass. But when we got to the passage between the gift shop and rectory, it was blocked by a parked car, and I could see and hear a group of people in the courtyard.

I tried to wedge between the car and the gift shop wall, but the stroller wouldn't fit. In frustration, I turned around and went back through grove, and we went around the neighborhood a different way instead.

The next day, which was yesterday, I discovered that the cause for the group at the church that night was that the annual remudding, called enjarre, was beginning. I went for a morning walk with Eliana and was startled to see that the entire church parking lot, front and back, was packed with cars. Even the side streets were full. I could barely navigate the stroller in certain places. The courtyard was packed with people, and there were two large trucks bearing cranes parked right next to the church. Groups of two or three were hoisted against the walls of the church in little boxes, beginning the process of giving the church its annual facial.

As I walked back through the grove, another large group was busy pruning and cleaning up. This was sort of a shock to see, as in all the time I've been walking through that grove, I've only run into a couple of other people doing the same, and there's usually a startled mutual acknowledgment along the lines of "Gee, I never see anyone else here." It even has a slight undertone of propriety, like, "This is my place - what are YOU doing here?"

Once I went specifically to the grove to pick up trash, and this was actually the first time I saw another person there. An older man was doing exactly the same thing I had come to do, so we naturally started talking. His name was Ray and he's a lifelong member of the church who periodically tends the grove. He told me about the family who owns the lot, how they live in another part of town and won't take care of it, how the church keeps trying to buy it from them but they won't sell.

In that conversation, I felt a kinship with Ray. Yes, I'm an outsider, but we were just two people taking care of a place we love, and I learned something about that place from him. But encountering the enjarre masses, I felt a mixture of negative emotions that surprised me with their force. I felt alienated, irritated, jealous, displaced.

Usually it is only members of the church that participate in enjarre, but this year they announced in the newspaper that it would be open to other committed volunteers. I felt a pang when I read this because I knew I would not sign up, partly because I don't know how much time I'd be able to commit because of having Eliana, but that's not the only reason. And I didn't really want to think about what that other reason is, but now I've been forced to: I don't want to share the church with others. I don't want to be part of a team, naked in the crowd. I want to have my little private love affair with that place. And this made me realize I'm like the other woman, refusing to recognize the wife.

And yet I do fiercely want to be involved. I want to go be a part of that whole huge thing. I want to contribute. I want to touch the church, smear mud in her cracks, share in this sacred communal act. I can't even believe such petty emotions are holding me back from it. I'm realizing that I might actually be attached to being an outsider because that makes the church uniquely mine, and if I let go of that, I'll lose it. It won't be special anymore.

Writing all this now makes it so very clear how ridiculous the ego really is.

Somehow, I foolishly thought I could just bypass this whole event, just sort of walk around it without touching it. But I see now I'm being called into something that isn't going to let me go. This event will continue daily for at least a week and maybe two. I have no idea how it's going to unfold, what I will do. At this point, I feel like I would be insulting the church and myself if I just avoided the place until enjarre is over. Will I let life distract me away from getting involved, or will I stop being such a chicken and just jump in? I honestly don't know.

Easy Runner

2010-06-02T13:22:00.000-06:00

I went for what has become my usual morning run a little late this morning, and when I came out of the grove into the church lot, there were quite a lot of cars and people, and it looked like a funeral. Turns out it was Dennis Hopper's, which I began to suspect by the eclectic nature of the crowd.

I tried to stay to the perimeter of the parking lot to be respectful, but as I ran past a parked car with an open door, I couldn't help but notice that a man was sitting there in his underwear putting on dress pants. Anyhoo.

I definitely felt a pang when I heard that Hopper had died, since True Romance, one of my very favorite movies, features him. In fact, there is a truly brilliant scene between him and Christopher Walken which I feel is one of the best scenes in any movie, ever. I'm glad for the grace that allowed me to brush up against his funeral and, however briefly and incompletely, honor his life with the expression of my own through running, something I'm completely stoked to finally be doing. I've realized that I'm a person of passion and intensity and if I don't give that energy a release in vigorous physical activity, it's going to assert itself in less healthy ways.

So I like that this new passion of mine connected me in some tiny way to Dennis Hopper's life and death. He was known for being "difficult," an "enfant terrible" - things I have been seen as often myself. He walked a self-destructive path for many years, but eventually emerged out of that, and overall his life can be perceived as a wild adventure, a kind of trail-blazing, and an amazingly diverse expression of creative genius. That inspires me.

And in many ways, Hopper embodied the spirit of Taos, which is itself a sort of enfant terrible. I love that his funeral was at the San Francisco de Asis church, which strikes me as a wonderful meshing of the frontier-like wildness, noble tradition, profuse creativity, and eclectic spirituality that is Taos.

As I write this now, I hear the bells at the church announcing the end of services. I also just re-watched on YouTube the scene that I mentioned, and I'll leave you with that. Some of you may not want to watch it as it's pretty intense in terms of violence and profanity. But if you can get past those things, it's definitely worth seeing, as Hopper's character stands up against the mafia in a brilliant way to defend his son, and becomes sort of a Christ figure in the process.

Self-Trotter

2010-05-25T11:33:00.000-06:00

I'm losing my religion. No, I'm not talking about Christianity. That's a religion I could never "lose" because it's written into my soul. My understanding and expression of it can and does deepen and change and grow, but what is essential in it cannot be lost, because, in the words of A Course in Miracles, "Nothing real can be threatened."

What I'm losing is the religion of "I need a partner to be complete," which is probably the most popular religion in the world, with the most convincing propaganda. "Can't live without you," "You complete me," "You are my everything," are just a portion of its liturgy.

This process began several months ago with a short but powerful dream. I was driving to my sort-of-sometimes-partner's house with the familiar feeling of anticipation and anxiety. I need to see him. What if he's not there? What if he's with a woman? It was nighttime, and there was a massive thunderstorm going on. I could barely see the dirt road that leads to his place, and feared I would drive off the side into the ditch. I was forced to slow down almost to the point of stopping, but was determined to go on. I had to get there. But all of a sudden, there was a huge flash of lightning that encompassed the whole scene. I found myself enveloped and completely stopped by blinding light. And in that moment, I just surrendered to it. I gave up. It was as though a voice deep inside me was saying, Stop this nonsense. You are already here. This light is what you want, and you are in it. BE in it. And I became very still and felt something akin to ecstasy in that living, permeating light. I woke up.

The significance and experience of this dream was so incredibly simple and obvious, so powerful, that it has remained prominent in my mind even though I didn't write it down and it was months ago. But it's only now that I'm really starting to live its message, to truly be in that light without trying to get anywhere else.

And this has left me in a strange new space that keeps unfolding. Until the other day, I couldn't say anything about it, but thanks to some blogging and other friends, I've found some words for it. One thing I see now is that it's not even relationships I've been addicted to, but THINKING about relationships. Since kindergarten, there's always been some boy on my mind. Always. And I get it now, that the need is to define myself against someone else. Do I exist if you don't? Hmmm. I've realized that the only times I wasn't thinking about a boy, I was thinking about someone who might be mad at me, or someone I'm mad at. It's about conflict, distance. Needing to define my own existence as apart from, NOT together with someone else's, as it might appear. Pure ego crap, to put it bluntly.

So now here I am, no longer a slave to those thoughts. Now how do I define myself? Well, I haven't been. Which is why I've had nothing to say. I've been deconstructed, I have no walls to bounce off, just free floating. And I'm very aware that no matter what I say, I'm just making up stories, none of which are ultimately true. And yet, as Kate put it in a comment on my last post, writing is the way to "know my insides." The stories are not true, but can contain truth, as it much as truth CAN be contained. And even more to the point, they construct meaning, a way of understanding. Language has its limits, but can, at its best, point to truth.

Jennifer and I had a conversation the other day about the limits of language, and how some words are just not adequate for what they describe. The specific word in question was "recovery." I don't think this word does justice to what it defines. As Jennifer said, it implies a mask, a re-covering. Once your light is uncovered, why re-cover it? The word we agreed was better is "remembering," as in remembering who you really are, as in re-membering. Sorting out and recreating the members of your being. This is what's happening to me now.

I'm amazed at how quickly after re-entering the blogosphere, I gained inspiration and understanding through my blogging friends. On Claire's blog the other day, she posted a quote about "inner geography," a term I immediately resonated with. It gave me the language, the analogy to begin describing where I am. It's as though I'm standing on the mountaintop of my inner geography for the first time in my life, exhausted and exhilarated from the climb, totally, gloriously alone, surveying my whole landscape. But it all looks strange and unfamiliar from this vantage point, and I feel detached from it - I'm not IN it, consumed by it anymore.

The paradoxical beauty of this is that when I'm outdoors now, when I'm sitting in the grove by the church, for instance, I am oh so much more fully IN the grass, the sky, the birdsong, the breeze.

In Claire's post, she discussed an upcoming trip she's taking. That woman is always going somewhere new in the world, and I admitted my envy of her being a globe-trotter. She came back and said that I was a "self-trotter." Yes. I am traveling the world of myself, which is the world. I'm in it, and it's everywhere in me. Hallelujah. As Rumi said, "To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes." Hallelujah indeed.

Easing Back

2010-05-19T22:18:00.000-06:00

I have been gone from the blogosphere for so long, I hardly know where to begin with this post. I can't yet fully articulate all of the changes that have been happening for me. These changes have a lot to do with why I haven't been blogging (or writing at all), but the other reason is simply that I've been extraordinarily busy.

Now, the semester is over, YouthFest (the sort-of major event I coordinated) is over, and I can ease back into my inner life, the part of myself that must be tended for anything to get written. Even as I write this, the words feel awkward; I've gotten rusty.

There is so much I want to share and explore in writing, but I have to begin where I am, in this tongue-tied place. All I can say is that everything has been expanding, opening up, becoming new. I guess you could call it a rebirth, and now I'm toddling into a new world. Great joy, passion, and inspiration light the way, even as I feel physically exhausted, emotionally stretched. I'm grateful for the opportunity I now have to putter around my house and garden and soul. To play with words again. To bake bread. To start taking my walks (and runs) again. And to reconnect with my blogging friends. I've missed you.

Easter Bells, A Blessing of Crows

2010-04-07T22:35:00.001-06:00

How mysterious that the Lent in which I did not attend church or immerse myself in Christian reading, ritual, or prayer was my most powerful one ever. I didn't read about Jesus, or even think about him much, but I have been going through a death/rebirth process that I think is what he was trying to teach about in the first place. Actually, it's not so much an ongoing "process" as it is a momentary, repeating occurrence: I find myself upset about something, and instead of trying to fight myself, I surrender, let the feeling die, and am reborn back into myself. It may happen many times a day.

I didn't know what I would do on Easter, and I deliberately made no plans. Since I had already been experiencing these rebirth-moments, Easter didn't strike me as terribly significant. When I arose Easter morning, I considered going to church, but found myself uninspired to do so.

I felt a certain sense of loss, of regret, that I was missing out. It was just a little nagging thing in the background of my attention, but it was enough to keep me feeling slightly off-center. I was sitting in my backyard feeling this offness when the church bells at San Francisco de Asis began to ring out. At first, hearing them intensified that uneasy feeling, but then the bells became church for me. They only rang for a minute or so, but as I surrendered my full attention to them, to enjoying them, I entered into those moments fully, and the Easter bells put me in the resurrection mood, brought me back to myself. Out of the tomb and into the day.

And I thought, as I often have, of a quote that Barbara at barefoot toward the Light posted a while back:

Just as the gong in a center for meditation reminds us from time to time to return to ourselves in the here and now, we all may become "bells of attentiveness." ~Dorothee Soelle in The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance.

I love this analogy, the poetic beauty of it and the immediate effect it has on me. Just by thinking bell of attentiveness, just by entertaining the image in my imagination, it becomes my experience, now. It's a little icon.

This rumination also led me to remember other "being a bell" quotes from two of my favorite writers:

“The day's blow rang out, metallic -- or it was I, a bell awakened, and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can” ~Denise Levertov

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck." ~Annie Dillard

The thing that occurs to me is that in the sound that rings out, bell and what strikes it are one. Which leads me to another quote I discovered recently:

Take time to stop and smell the flowers," says an old homily. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD and lived to age 102, had a different approach. "Take the time to stop and be the flowers," he said.

That's my advice to you. Don't just set aside a few stolen moments to sniff the snapdragons, taste the rain, chase the wind, watch the hummingbirds, and listen to a friend. Use your imagination to actually be the snapdragons and rain and wind and hummingbirds and friend. Don't just behold the Other; become the Other. ~Rob Brezsny, Freewill Astrology

Easter afternoon, I walked over to the church, something I've not done much recently. It was sunny, warm, and breezy, and no one was around. I lay on a wooden bench in the courtyard for quite a while, gazing up through the branches of a pine tree.

On my way back home through the grove, I noticed a lovely little patch of green green grass, something we don't have a lot of here in dry New Mexico, especially in early spring. I sat down in its softness, letting the play of light and tree branch shadows dance over me. I became very still, and watched two large crows fly back and forth among the trees, until they both came to perch in the one nearest me. Out of intense stillness and silence, their occasional lazy caws resonated through me, and the three of us just rested together. As I gazed at one of them, he or she looked back at me with tilted head. I felt an unmistakable connection, a message, the warm thrill of a caress. To be noticed by such a glorious creature! I was lifted and struck.

I may have missed church, but I didn't miss communion.

Backstory

2010-03-20T18:45:00.000-06:00

As it turns out, I have given up church for Lent.

Will I go back once Lent is over? I don't know. I have no idea what's going to happen next in any area of my life. I'm out of control. (I looked all over for it - I'm definitely out.) Hurray!

Giving up attachment to stories. Surrendering all goals except awakening, the paradox being that to awaken, even that goal must be surrendered.

Learning to say Yes to everything. As someone very wise once pointed out, Yes is surrender.

I started out by giving up bitching for Lent. That was the surface goal, but I recognized that to truly do this, I had to give up the negative thinking that leads to bitching in the first place, otherwise it would just be a sorry attempt at control.

When I announced my intention on my blog, Dan recommended Byron Katie and The Work. I began to explore that website, then mentioned what I was discovering there to Jennifer, who suggested I also read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. From there began an amazingly rapid process of unraveling:

To give up bitching I had to undo negative thinking. To undo negative thinking I had to look at my beliefs, which led to examining the stories I tell myself, which led finally to seeing that all stories are untrue. Even the good ones.

I came to the edge of this forest once before, a long time ago, but I wasn't ready to enter then. There were still stories I wanted to believe, and I didn't understand that one doesn't come to Reality by denying the body (or the world) and its stories, but by fully entering into them with an alert and embracing yet questioning mind.

To see the world as illusion or Maya is not to blow it all off and sit in your head. It's merely to perceive the deeper Reality that is the Source. (I feel like A.A. Milne, using all these caps.) That was one of my biggest stumbling blocks when I tried to come to this before, and I ultimately found myself lost. That's when I turned to the Bible and church.

In adopting a biblical worldview, one of the greatest joys was in experiencing the earth and myself as Creation, as real. (Now I'm thinking of The Velveteen Rabbit.) Reading the Bible, especially some of the beautiful nature imagery in the Psalms, and shifting my worldview this way turned me into an environmentalist and a social activist, because I finally had permission to care, to love Creation and all of its creatures. Before that, when I saw the world as illusion, as something to be transcended, I didn't see it at all let alone feel that I wanted to care for it.

And so I entered a new paradigm, one in which there was a true Presence and Creative Intelligence who loved the earth, who made it and continues to make it in every moment, and who - could it possibly be??? - loved me. Forgave me. A Being who I didn't have to keep trying to climb some endless ladder to get to, who was instead reaching down to me, just where I was with all of my flaws. I spiritually relaxed for the first time in years, maybe ever. I accepted the gift that I now saw was always being offered, and realized that this was all I'd ever had to do to be with God. In Christianity, that gift comes in the form of Christ.

I had spent so much time and energy trying (and failing) to connect with a formless, distant God, that it was an immense relief to embrace the incarnate version. So much more accessible. The Son became for me the access point to the Divine and to my own incarnation, the intersection of the ineffable and the tangible. This is one of the most important symbolic meanings of the cross for me.

It makes perfect sense to me that if there is a God that God would take the form of a human to be able to communicate in a language humans can hear and comprehend.

Now, as this most powerful and unexpected Lenten journey winds down toward Easter, I find myself considering anew the Resurrection. There are those who never seem to get to that part of the story. There are others who try to jump straight to it and miss the point of the way of the cross, which is about surrender, the ultimate Yes. Without that Yes, resurrection is impossible. However, the Yes can only happen because it sees the deeper Reality that makes resurrection not only possible but inevitable.

Asking if (or stating that) Jesus and the Resurrection really happened loses all importance when one comes to the point of view that nothing has ever really happened, no story is true except in the telling. Anything with a beginning, middle, and end necessarily falls into the realm of illusion because the present moment is the only ultimately real thing, and the Being within it.

And so, as I contemplate the Jesus story during a time in which all stories are dissolving, what I see, the true beauty of this and any good story - which is any story rightly perceived - is that the point is to go beyond the story into the Yes, the surrender, the all-encompassing Now that is eternal reality. In that Yes are both the crucifixion and the resurrection; in this one moment they occur simultaneously, and are seen for the stories they are.

Gradual change occurs in an instant. And now, all that's left is love.

Arising

2010-03-17T20:24:00.001-06:00

Today is St. Patrick's Day,
and
I have no ritual, no essay.

What was his story again?
Something green, about snakes
and the Christ. The only interest
this holy day holds for me
now is the Breastplate, the invocation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Heaven

My stories are dissolving, fading out,
like the last scene of a movie
when the landscape goes
out of focus until all is golden light
filling the screen.

Light of the Sun

My stories are riding into the sunset,
they are getting married, and I am
giving them away,
they are dying in their sleep
of old age.

Radiance of Moon

I am turning
to poetry.

Splendor of Fire

The question has been posed:
Your desert island book?
For me, a very large anthology
of sacred poetry spanning
all times and places.

Speed of Lightning

My back is to St. Francis and my stories
go down with the sun behind him.
I am facing Sister Clare, and even she
has nothing to tell
but Shine.

Swiftness of Wind

All the stories are a trick of mirrors
and light. Forget the mirror -
who needs it, when you have the source?

Depth of Sea

I have told the story of why
I joined the church,
of the horrors of self-made religion,
wrong-headedness and failure, the need
for cleansing. Yes.
But this is only the part
that happens in front
of the audience, there is
also the backstage,
the fear of glimpses
of utter reality, absolute freedom
and emptiness, which sitting
in a church soothed for a while.
Four walls, a safe structure,
a place to lick wounds,
a well-lit path at the edge
of a forest that can never stop
inviting.

Stability of Earth

Now
I see the forest and the trees
as I stand among them
with no exposition,
no tale of bread crumbs, bears, or witches
to frighten, console, or instruct,
with in fact nothing
but an endless poem
that both does and does not
need me to get itself heard.

Firmness of Rock

The Conjunctive Mood

2010-03-07T17:37:00.001-07:00

Recently my son was having trouble with his laptop; it was processing slower than he wanted it to, so I showed him how to defragment the hard drive. While looking at the defrag screen together, he was confused, and asked how it works. I said I wasn't entirely sure, but that it's a way of moving files together so there's no wasted space.

The analogy I used was that of a bookshelf, on which the books are disorganized and randomly placed, some standing, some in piles, with unused space in-between. Defragmenting is like taking all the books and standing them up together to create more usable space. It's a way of organizing.

I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's miraculous book, The Power of Now, and later that day I came across a passage that made me go deeper into the defragmentation analogy. He says that the inability to feel connected to Being (a word he uses in place of "God") causes you to "perceive yourself consciously or unconsciously as an isolated fragment." And I thought, when we feel this way we are like a book askew and alone on the shelf, unread, undusted, just taking up space.

Or we are like an instrument in the orchestra when the musicians are tuning up and there's no harmony. Each instrument makes a sound with no connection to any other, and the result is discord, cacophony.

I have not been blogging much lately, partly because my outer life has become quite busy of necessity, but even more so because my inner life has been shifting radically. I have been undergoing a defragmentation process. The orchestra has stopped tuning up and the first few notes of coherence and harmony have begun.

This is happening because of some recent life events that have urged me to move away from the negative thought processes that have kept me fragmented. Some of these events have been by choice, such as giving up bitching for Lent, and some of them have come from the "outside." In conjunction with these events is the reading I've been doing of Tolle and of Byron Katie's book Loving What Is. At this point, I must heartily thank Jennifer for directing me to Tolle and Dan for directing me to Byron Katie. The fact that I was turned on to these amazing resources at the same time blows my mind. Literally. Because the purpose of these books is in fact completely aligned, and that purpose is undoing the egoic mind, bringing the Self into awareness and acceptance of reality in the moment. Embodied in this is the realization that the mind is an instrument, yet only one in the whole orchestra. It has its uses, but when it's allowed to run the show, the result is discord.

Within a few days of applying the principles of these books, I was experiencing and responding to life significantly differently. (I will post more about this soon.)

Around the same time, I also drew a card from The Kabbalah Deck, and pulled the Hebrew letter Vov (or Vav), which means "and."

Edward Hoffman, the creator of The Kabbalah Deck, says that Vov "reveals that things seemingly separate and even contradictory...can be seen to comprise a higher unity. With the right attentiveness, we can perceive the nature of that unity and thereby resolve conflicts." This sounds uncannily related to the practice of Negative Capability (see my About Me section for the definition of this term.) This quote shows why Negative Capability is important, and not as abstract and esoteric as it seems. It's a practical process resulting in defragmentation.

And. Such a little but powerful word. The supreme conjunction. And is the solution to fragmentation. It is the empty space, the gap, the silence and stillness between things. It's a powerful and always accessible koan. It's the reason I make collage, the very nature of it. It joins all things.

Black and white.
Fire and water.
Male and female.
Inspiration and expiration.
Inner and outer.
Yes and no.
Past and future.

To meditate on the and is to truly apprehend the things it joins, but also to become less attached to them. To see that higher unity, which cannot be understood by the egoic mind because its mantra is "or."

Interestingly, Vov is also associated with the ability to reverse past and future tenses in Biblical Hebrew. According to Inner.org, "the power of teshuvah [repentance or returning to God] to completely convert one's past to good, is the power of the vav to invert the past to the future.

I see a connection here to English grammar's conjunctive mood (more commonly called the subjunctive mood). This is a way of joining past, present, and future tenses, but can be done for different purposes and with different effects.

It can emphasize the present as the place where past and future meet, or in the case of expressing a wish, for example, it does almost the opposite. It reaches to the past and the future with no real recognition of the present. This is very fitting, since wishing by its very nature reaches to the future with no regard for the present.

But the conjunctive mood is also used for blessing, a way of coming fully into the present and allowing it to extend into the future. For example, the conjunctive mood phrase, "Peace be with you" is for right now, but also a continuation into the future. Same thing with "God bless you." It's subtle, because the emphasis is on the present, as it should be. The hint of future enters with the implied word: "May." (May) peace be with you, (May) God bless you. If the word was included, the emphasis would be on the future, but because it is not, the present-tense form of the verb is in the spotlight.

Interestingly, this type of construction is falling out of usage, and (according to Wikipedia) especially in the UK, for some reason. In fact, there its usage is actually being fought. What does this change reflect, I wonder?

I like this construction; I like contemplating that even the ways we use language reflect our spiritual condition. It is another vehicle for practicing Negative Capability, specifically with the paradoxical and mysterious nature of time. I find myself living in a conjunctive mood these days. And my favorite koan-ish conjunctive mood phrase, appropriate to end this contemplation with is:

So be it.

Laundry Day

2010-02-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

Today is significant for a number of reasons.

First, it's my birthday, and as it seems to work out every year, I'm going to the laundromat to wash clothes. This is not something I have planned as a tradition - it just sort of happens. I'm not complaining; I actually don't mind doing laundry, and there's something fitting about getting garments clean to usher in a new age.

I have, in fact, been thinking a bit about clothing. Eryl posted recently about her appreciation for high fashion, which made me think of the movie The Devil Wears Prada, which I then had to go watch again. And I've encountered some biblical references to clothing recently that remind me of the theological term I made up a few years ago: "pantstheism." This is not the same thing as pantheism, which is the belief that the Divine is within and contained by creation and does not exist outside of it. Pantstheism is basically an alternative to the word "panentheism," which is the concept that God exists within all of creation but also created it and is beyond it. The creation of my term was inspired by Psalm 102: 25-27:

In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
       and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you remain;
       they will all wear out like a garment.
       Like clothing you will change them
       and they will be discarded.
But you remain the same,
       and your years will never end.

The Divine is in the creation the way we are in our clothes. Our favorite jeans and sweater take our shape, conform to our image, absorb the energy and scent of our bodies. God is both the maker and the wearer of the garment that is creation.

This rumination has been coming to me in a new way lately, as I've been immersed in contemplating the distinctions between the inner and the outer life. More than ever before, I'm focused on true inner change, deliberately turning my attention away from outer distractions, whether they be situations or thoughts. Mostly thoughts. Why don't I consider these thoughts part of the inner world, you may ask? Because I'm increasingly seeing this kind of Monkey Mind thought as something that is actually foreign to my true Self, which is why it is so confusing, unpleasant, and even destructive to identify with it. It's like wearing rough polyester clothing that's garish and too tight.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was dreading Lent - the dryness of the desert, the stripping away. But I feel incredibly blessed to realize that the reason for this self-denial is to discover a joy and abundance so far beyond anything else that the stripping is a relief. The analogy that jumps immediately to mind is that if you want to fully experience the ecstasy of physical intimacy, you have to take off your clothes.

But in the moment before embrace there can be discomfort and disorientation; you are naked, and the room is too cold, the lights are too bright. You doubt who you are without your clothes, and if you identify with those thoughts, the embrace will be diminished or avoided altogether. I have had moments like this lately, too. But unlike the past, I'm finding it in my Self to not become so identified with these thoughts that I go hide in the closet or get dressed again in fifteen layers of confusion. And a large part of why I'm able to do this is because of blogging - being able to write and share my process with a supportive community that interacts with me by introducing me to wonderful resources or giving me helpful suggestions or simply listening and understanding.

Which leads me to another significance of this day, which is that this is my fiftieth post. I have been blogging for just over five months, and in this time I have connected with some incredible people and reclaimed my voice as a writer. I am continually astounded and inspired by the community I find myself part of here and its genuine effects on my life.

And so it's fitting that today I'm accepting an award from Entrepreneur Chick. I feel somewhat ambivalent about blogging awards for a number of reasons that I don't want to lengthen this post by discussing, but this particular award is one I will be pleased to display on my blog because it's pretty and happy-inducing to look at. And it has an orange flower!

I hereby dedicate this post and pass along this award to all of my blogging friends, my cross-pollinators. You know who you are. Your blogs and your comments have truly pollinated my life and helped me bloom, and for that I have immense gratitude.

A Sacrifice of Praise

2010-02-21T01:07:00.000-07:00

Life is amazing. Just when you think there's nothing left, no hope, no color, no meaning, you get a glorious surprise. We say and we shape and we dance around everything, always trying to reconnect, always working, always penetrating, only to find that we actually did know the whole time what we knew.

I'm here to say that life is good. Because it's life. All the horror in the world is to show us the way beyond horror. All the buttons our loved ones push are to show us the buttons so we can leave them alone. All the brokenness points to the wholeness that has always and will always exist, and only exists. Does this make any sense? Why have a world like this? It can seem a cruel joke, but the only ripe option is to trust. To embrace the mystery. To become the beloved.

I love and I love and I love. There is nowhere else to go. Every blooming thing is a gift, if I know how to unwrap it. And thankfully, everyone and everything shows me how. Hallelujah.

Alone With Love

2010-02-16T23:26:00.002-07:00

Ash Wednesday is almost upon me. The first day of Lent. A day to begin forty days of fasting. What for? What is the purpose of this? Self-deprivation. It's no fun. I face Lent each year with a kind of dread. Why do this to myself?

Today is Mardi Gras, the feast before the fast. I don't feel inspired about what I'm giving up this year. I don't feel ready. I've dedicated this year to quiet love, and I'm giving up bitching for Lent. I'm giving up negative expression, but more than that, deeper than that, my goal is to give up negative thought. So what should my "feast" be? A bitchfest, no doubt. Which, come to think of it, puts me in the great biblical tradition of people like Job, who mightily complained to God when things didn't go his way.

There are so many things I can bitch about from traffic to the uncertainty I feel in my own heart. But what I really want to focus on is the unfairness of the blindness it seems I'm doomed to wander through life with. The inevitable pain and sorrow, the intolerable length of time it takes for any real healing to occur, despite my unending attempts to focus on this healing. The fact that all I've wanted for years is a true partner in life, someone to raise my children and build a home with, and that I still don't have that, and it's increasingly looking like I never will. One of my children has already grown up and moved out and another one will in a year. I'm on my own.

Despite knowing what holds me back from the kind of love and partnership I want, I find myself unable to make the changes that would allow this. At least not fast enough. And the irony is that these very issues are the ones my last potential partner could least deal with because of his issues, which in turn were the last I could deal with.

Why is life this way? It's a mystery, a paradox, and very often I find beauty and comfort in this, but, honestly, sometimes IT JUST SUCKS.

And at times like this, it becomes completely obvious that it's all about death. The destination is the grave for the body and the refiner's fire for the ego. I can go kicking and screaming, or I can go willingly. But seriously - who is going to go to the fire and the grave without a little kicking and screaming? Does it even really matter?

Of course it does. The grace with or without which I submit to these things makes all the difference in the world. And I know this, but sometimes it's still impossible to find that grace, to live it.

I look and look for the love that will make me whole, but death reminds me, the fire shows me, that there is no other option but to find it in myself. The wellspring of love is within me, and I will be comforted and healed by it there, or not at all. I am alone with love, or I am just alone.

So this is the purpose of Lent. To deprive myself of external things that only seem to give me what I want and need, in order to be less distracted from the true source of love.

And while I'm feeling sorry for myself because I'm not in Louisiana for Mardi Gras, and try to find the Mardi Gras Mambo on YouTube to cheer myself up, instead I find something that reminds me in more than one way of how little I truly have to bitch about:

The Flower That Killed My Car

2010-02-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

This morning, Jenny Stevning's post, because of its use of the word "enough" reminded me of a particular event in my life from a couple of summers ago. I was going to leave a comment summarizing this event, but as I began to do so, I went back so fully in my memory to this time, that I had to pull out what I wrote about it back then. Reading through it, I was overcome with emotion, since I have recently withdrawn myself from the relationship involved. And I see that it's somehow part of my healing to bring forth this writing. So here it is:

My boyfriend Justin and I are driving across coastal Texas in Henrietta, my maraschino red Ford Escort, who was named as a tip of the hat to Mr. Ford himself. We've been camping at Goose Island State Park and are now headed to Austin. As we cruise down quiet green Highway 35, the sun is just contemplating setting. Suddenly, Justin stops the car next to a tall golden field and wanders off into it. When he comes back, he hands me a huge bell-shaped flower, tissue-paper pink with a deep crimson center and little ridges running through the petals. You could easily imagine one of Cicely Mary Barker’s fairies living inside.

While I'm admiring this flower, Justin turns the ignition and a horrible grinding sound punches from the engine. We don't know it yet, but this is Henrietta's last word, not counting the pathetic gasp that occurs when Justin turns the key again. We momentarily enter that state of denial endemic to the first moments after a death. Henrietta has faithfully escorted me for ten years, over many miles and across many landscapes, never showing signs of illness. This is the equivalent of a major stroke.

We are between two tiny towns in rural Texas during dinnertime on a Saturday. There's no answer at the first towing company. I'm elated when a warm female voice greets me at the second. She assures us that someone will be sent, but from the larger town of Victoria a couple of dozen miles away, so it will take “a little while.”

I admit, I’m not great at dealing with little annoyances. They often seem a personal affront from a god with a mean sense of humor. But when larger obstacles come along, I tend to view them as meaningful, so I'm quick to accept them. Such it is with Henrietta’s death. Justin, however, doesn’t know this about me yet, and I can see him bracing himself for my grumpiness. But I hang the flower from the rearview mirror, dig a knife and perfectly ripe cantaloupe out of the back of the car, and turn on public radio. A show called Art of the Song is featuring a young musician named Meg Hutchinson. Justin and I slurp cantaloupe and listen to this delicious woman speak of her childhood in New England, of attending a little Waldorf school with a garden. How this school gave her “a sense of the interrelatedness of things.” She performs a piece called, “America Enough,” inspired by the notion that “anything taken to its extreme becomes its opposite.” The song is mellow and contemplative, and sends a quiet thrill upon my skin, as she sings:

If there's noise enough, it turns back to silence
If there's crowd enough, it turns back to solitude
If there's pain enough, it turns back to something almost bright...
If there's time enough, there's no such thing as an hour
If there's love enough, the rest of this won't even matter.

And I understand. There is love enough. Justin's face aglow, our flower and fruit, the field, the sunset, and the warm moist air. I am not waiting for anything. Sometimes being forced to stop is the only sweet relief from going on and on. Broken down becomes whole.

But...

It's Sunday now, auto shops closed. We're stuck in Victoria. On the Comfort Inn's lobby computer, I look up the flower that killed Henrietta: it's a Swamp Rose Mallow. I discover at 2become1weddings.com that the meaning/sentiment of this flower is “Consumed by love.” I also learn that Pliny claimed, “Whosoever shall take a spoonful of the Mallows shall that day be free from all diseases that may come to him.” Well, apparently this magic does not extend to the next day, because yesterday's joy and wonder has shriveled like the flower still attached to poor Henrietta's rearview mirror.

I've learned that the feeling of doom is fleeting and illusory, but if indulged, will bring reality into its pathetic clutches. And so I do what I can to escape it, generally by changing the scenery, getting physically out of where I'm psychologically stuck. Even if it’s just sitting at the top of an outdoor stairwell at a Comfort Inn in a gulf coast thunderstorm, fifteen feet away from the room I share with my boyfriend, who I temporarily can’t stand because he’s chosen the Sci-Fi channel over adventure. Over me.

I'm considering a line from that song - If there's comfort enough, it turns back to sorrow. Last night, when we sat in our broken down car, plagued by humidity, mosquitoes, and ants, I was more comfortable than I am now, lodged in an air-conditioned room with a king-sized bed and cable. There were physical discomforts then, but they weren't important. We had a juicy cantaloupe and great radio. And each other. Now, only partially sheltered from the furious rain and earsplitting thunder, I find more fulfillment gazing over the soggy parking lot of the Comfort Inn than lounging on one of its cushy beds.

An old boyfriend once said I expect too much from daily life. It's true. I want moments of magical transcendence and communion to define my days. This is deeply connected to my desire to travel. In moving from place to place, everything is extraordinary, fluid, and thus primed for moments of transcendence. But just taking a trip is not enough. As Paulo Coelho has said, “God is always hiding hell in the middle of paradise.” Traveling with loved ones inevitably reveals roadblocks within the relationship, the self. And this is a special kind of hell because there are less channels of escape when you're sharing a small hotel room. The swings between transcendence and pettiness get closer together and more distinct. It's alarmingly easy somehow to go from sharing awe over a sunset to cold positioning on opposite sides of a king-sized bed.

After three tense days of coming to terms with Henrietta's demise, we board a bus home. The last leg of our journey is by train, and as I'm gazing out the window another train passes. The view becomes a rapid and chaotic alternation of train, landscape, train, landscape. And a voice inside me says: Don’t strain to see, just let it all pass before your eyes. Let it all be there, and all roll away. I think back over the past few days, about how in relationships, as in travel, it's necessary at times to give up the itinerary and creatively face roadblocks, seeing in them the opportunity to expand limits and face fears. What travel acutely offers is the opportunity to surrender to movement, accept and even embrace unpleasantness in the context of a larger joy. If there's love enough, the rest of this won't even matter. It suddenly hits me that this shift in perception is the true movement of travel.

I reach for the hand that picked the flower that killed my car.

Big Ole Poetry Challenge

2010-02-08T10:12:00.001-07:00

I was inspired recently by Eryl's post in which she discusses the meaning of the word "core." She posted a drawing of the earth with a piece cut out of it to show the red and orange core. It wasn't until I read this post that I made the connection between the second chakra and what is commonly called the core of the body.

I have also been inspired by Dan Gurney's emphasis on poetic forms lately, so rather than put together one of my usual convoluted essays, I decided to write a poem on the subject of the core. I chose to make it a sestina, which is one of the most complicated forms to write. The premise is that you choose six words which you use repeatedly at the end of each stanza, in a certain order. You can read about sestinas and their intricate ordering here.

I've only written one other in my life, and it was handed to me by the muse in the shower one day. This one, while not quite as easily given, was still not as hard as it seems like it should be. I had no idea what I was going to write; I just chose six words that are interesting and relevant to me right now, and then it practically wrote itself. There is something very freeing to me about writing in a strict form, the way strict choreography makes a dance more fluid.

I would like to challenge any adventurous blogger to play with this form, and then share what you came up with on your blog. It's really a lot of fun, especially if you're a word nerd like me. And I've realized that there's something about this form that lends itself to extraordinary magic.

Svadhisthana Sestina

If you're going to start at all, start from the core,
not with singing or speaking, but with quiet
breath. Inhale and exhale the color orange,
let inspiration and expiration interlace
as the brilliance of the sun becomes the moon.
So begins the dance. In and out, it spirals slow,

more than can be imagined, as the Earth was slow
to reveal herself, her galaxy home and flaming core.
As she circles round the sun, so is circled by the moon
in this constant looping stillness: space is cold and quiet.
Look into the night - shawl of stars like lace
across black linen; on the horizon, a sash of mounting orange,

trick of light and proximity. Thick hot orange
ascends to cold and clears to white, with a long slow
birth up the sky. Notice these movements; they lace
together all that can be noticed around the single core
of your noticing. Then refrain from vision and be quiet
in your desire, in your fear, as you moon

over all you feel you've lost. Whisper to the Moon
and she will teach you. Now peel and eat an orange,
one section at a time. This is not a quiet
action; a scream attends each slow
tear of flesh from flesh. You will find no core
in this, only a tough and tangled lace.

Without washing the juice from your fingers, lace
them together. You are cupping the moon.
Resting your hands in your lap, close to your core,
simply digest. The food becomes your blood, scent of orange
your remembrance. Let your heartbeat slow
until it too is consumed, its work quiet.

Here is the only place there is, this quiet,
where all things emerge and interlace.
You may speak now, but let your words form slow.
They must ever recall the solid moon
and illusive sun, that dismembered orange,
the things you've never touched, galaxy to molten core.

Spent now is the slow night with its quiet
shades, and once again the moon dissolves like ancient lace
into blue sky, green earth, orange sun. Into your fiery core.

The Slow Waxing of Light and Life

2010-02-06T16:46:00.001-07:00

This is such an awkward time of year. I'm tired of winter, being housebound, being cold, and I'm still immersed in the inner world of contemplation, to the point that I am fairly grumpy with anyone who wants to distract me from it, which is mainly my children, of course. Rumi said, "My worst habit is I get so tired of winter I become a torture to those I'm with." I relate to that bear in hibernation. Just leave me alone and let me dream. Let me focus on my sap rising, but don't ask me for any of it yet.

Alas, that is not the way it works in Real Life, is it? It's hard to slow down when the world doesn't want you to. And we don't get days off for Tu Bishvat, or for Imbolc and Candlemas, the other two holidays that have occurred recently:

January 29/30 - Tu Bishvat (I discussed this here.)

February 1 - Imbolc.

A day to celebrate the Celtic Brigid, who is goddess or saint, depending on your tradition. In typical Celtic fashion, the goddess and saint stories blend; she was said to be the foster-mother of Jesus. I adore her; she is my divine soul-sister, associated with poetry, the hearth-fire, metalsmithing, midwifery, bees, and sacred wells.

February 2 - Candlemas.

A Christian celebration of the return of the light, involving the blessing of beeswax candles, and officially ending the Epiphany season. Traditionally, people would leave up their Christmas greenery until this day.

All three of these days celebrate the return of life to the earth, the very beginning of spring's return, the waxing of light. The planting of seeds is a common ritual for all three celebrations. Imbolc and Candlemas are closely associated and the focus is on purification and renewal of vows, rededication to the Path, refocusing, taking new action.

This ties in nicely for me with Yesod's emphasis on actualizing spiritual concepts. My sap is rising up the Tree, from Malkuth to Yesod, but I needed a jumpstart. These holidays provided me with it. However, the not getting days off really irked me. I ended up spreading my celebrations and rituals out over an entire week, just to fit it all in around my schedule.

My plans were elaborate; I was going to:

burn my Christmas tree which has been standing forlornly in my backyard since Epiphany
take a meditative orange-tinted salt bath for purification (using kosher sea salt and the Elmo fizzy bath colors Eliana got for Christmas - one yellow and one red)
begin my Svadhisthana exercises
bless the orange beeswax candles I bought at Cid's
then fill the whole house with candlelight, while I
thoughtfully write out and then recite my spiritual vows for the year
plant an indoor herb garden with the kit I bought, focusing on the meaning and fruitful fulfillment of my vows (Basil - for love, exorcism, prosperity; Rosemary - for love, purification, and faithfulness; Thyme - for courage, health, and strength)

The first day I tried to do all these things, I had to begin by cleaning the house, which is obviously part of the purification process. I mopped all the floors, which was a wonderful way to start, but by the time I had wiped down all surfaces, picked up everything off the floors, then swept and mopped, half the day was gone.

I then went through my new exercises for the first time, while listening to The Bee Priestesses, which was remarkably energizing and empowering. After that, I took my ritual bath, which was also a powerful experience, but by then, the day was winding down to the time when the kids come home, so I had to stop there.

Then the boiler that powers my baseboard heater system went out. And I became very aware that elaborate rituals and celebrations are a luxury when you're too cold to function. I was forced to slow down, then. One day I was so cold all I could do was take a bath and get into bed. I slept all afternoon, which was a luxury in itself, and one I haven't indulged in since I can't remember when.

During that period without heat, I thought about homeless people in cold places like New York and Chicago, and I thought about people who don't have any time to themselves because they're too busy surviving, and I felt that strange tension between gratitude and guilt that seems to be a characteristic of citizens of western industrialized cultures.

Am I being frivolous, self-indulgent by doing these things when I "should" be working? This was the question I kept pushing away when I started my celebrations. But after the heater broke, the question was irrelevant, because I was involved in a more basic existence issue. Even being able to ask questions like the one above is a luxury. A privilege, a freedom.

But no. It is not frivolous to do these things if they help me to center and be healthy and grow. It is, however, a luxury, a privilege, a freedom - not to feel guilty about, but to be grateful for. And so, the heater breaking factored into my vows, which hadn't been properly written yet when it happened. I made several vows related to different areas of my life, but the most important one, resulting from my heater ordeal, was to offer gratitude and praise for everything, not in some vague general way, but for specific individual things and people and events as they come into my field of vision, and thus to grow in my awareness of them. Even when they're unpleasant and I don't like them.

So with the burning of the tree*, I let my guilt becomes ashes to feed the earth.
With the blessing and lighting of candles, I awaken my awareness of blessing and light.
With the burying of seeds into earth**, I plant my intentions, and as the seeds die out of their form and grow into something new, I will express my gratitude for the death of my old shell and limits of perspective, and I praise the earth and light and water and struggle that bring forth new life.

Amen.

The unexpected completion to my celebrations:

Jenny Stevning posted this drawing as a page to print and color

in response to my mention of her in this post.

Thank you, Jenny. Coloring this was most fun!

*The tree burning actually didn't go too well. I had forgotten how long it takes wood to dry. I did manage to singe it a bit, after a half hour involving a lighter, copious amounts of newspaper, very cold hands, and more starter fluid than I care to admit.
**I mixed the body of the dead bee I found at Epiphany into the soil. It just seemed like the thing to do.

The Color of Quiet Love

2010-02-05T13:06:00.002-07:00

On the heels of yesterday's post, I read this Rumi poem in The Essential Rumi, which I bought recently at my favorite thrift/consignment store, Pieces.

Quietness

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

~Rumi
(translated by Coleman Barks

in The Essential Rumi)

I love the way it ties in with quiet love, the exploration of color, slowing down, and the deathlike experience of winter that so many people seem to be having right now. The line "become the sky" reminded me of one of my favorite songs, "I Am The Highway," by Audioslave. This video oddly but beautifully combines the song with clips from the movie, Into the Wild, which happens to be one of my favorite movies:

New Year of the Trees

2010-02-04T22:25:00.001-07:00

I have a wonderful fat little book called Earth Prayers, which contains earth-centered prayers from many different traditions. There's an index of special days throughout the year, connected with different prayers in the book. This is how I came to learn about Tu Bishvat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees, which takes place on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shvat. Which happens to have been last weekend.

I found many detailed resources for this celebration online. I think the thing I love about Judaism the most is its emphasis on elaborate, meaningful, home-based ritual. I also love the fact that Jews celebrate four different New Years, in different seasons. This makes so much sense to me - the year is a circle, which begins and ends anywhere and nowhere. It's not a line from Point A to Point B.

I printed out a rather long booklet of the haggadah for the seder meal to be performed on the eve of this holiday. Unfortunately, I was unable to get it together in time to actually go through the seder, but I did read through it, in the manner of Lectio Divina. The symbolic gestures (even when only performed in the imagination) and Hebrew prayers are quite beautiful and affective.

This holiday has had an interesting evolution (which you can read about extensively if you explore the link for Tu Bishvat above) but one of its primary associations is with the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life. In Kabbalistic wisdom, there are considered to be four worlds, corresponding to different levels of reality, from the physical to the purely spiritual. The Tu Bishvat seder symbolically takes you through those four worlds (up the Tree) with the eating of different kinds of fruit and the drinking of wine. Reading through the haggadah, I realized one would probably end up slightly drunk by the end of the meal, with the ritualistic drinking of four glasses of wine. But I suppose the tradition is to make the meal a long, relaxed affair that could take hours.

All of this got me thinking about trees, and I started looking through my library for anything interesting to read about them. I pulled out a book I bought for homeschooling purposes called Keepers of the Earth. It's an amazing resource for anyone teaching children (Dan, Jennifer - I sincerely hope you have this book). Using traditional stories from various Native tribes, it teaches children about ecology and other sciences, as well as Native American culture and history.

I read the story in the section on trees, called "Manabozho and the Maple Trees." This story is from the Anishinabe, in the Great Lakes region, which is also where I grew up. The gist of it is that maple syrup used to come straight from the trees year-round, but people got lazy and started lying under the trees all the time with their mouths open.

So our hero, Manabozho, went up to the top of the trees and poured water into them, making the syrup thin and barely sweet, and the Great Spirit made it so that the sap only comes at the end of winter and the people have to work hard to turn it into syrup.

This story made me think back to my childhood in Toronto, when we would take school field trips to the maple farm in February, and watch the sap drip ever-so-slowly into metal buckets, and then go inside to see how they filled huge vats with sap and boiled it for ever so long to turn it into syrup.

And I realized that it's just perfect to have a New Year for trees just when the sap is beginning to flow. And I also began to think about slowness.

Dan Gurney recently posted an article he and his wife wrote for their local newspaper, a plea for the people of his town to slow down when they're driving. This post really humbled me because I'm almost always in a rush when I'm driving, and frequently get irritated with people on the road who drive under the speed limit.

And then, Lucy posted about slowing down enough to take good care of ourselves. One of the things I want to develop this year is the ability to truly relax, not just every now and then, but as a more constant state of being. Dan's and Lucy's posts, combined with contemplation of the slowness of the maple syrup-making process, made me realize that if I want to be more relaxed, I've got to learn to slow down. Be patient. That relaxation and patience are in fact two aspects of just slowing down. And that paradoxically, this will lead to a quickening of body and spirit, increased energy, a less rushed sense of time.

The story of Manabozho has reminded me that being relaxed and slowing down doesn't mean lazing beneath a tree with syrup dripping into my mouth, but is a manner of working and spirited living, being an active participant in turning work into a sweet gift.

And when I begin to slip into my familiar sense of rush and tension, I need to call to mind the maple with its slow gift of sap, or the luxurious live oak with its lazy swaying moss, or my favorite - the slowest and most spirited of trees, the patient redwood. I would marry a redwood if I could.

Ah, trees. My favorite teachers. Thank you for reminding me.
Happy New Year, dear trees.

How surely gravity’s law
strong as an ocean current
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place
Only we, in our arrogance
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrender
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things
because they are in God’s heart
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us
to fall
patiently to trust our heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

~Rilke

(Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Addendum

2010-02-03T17:12:00.001-07:00

In trying to sort through the now vast array of information I've gathered about the color orange and its symbolic extensions, I neglected a few things in my last post, such as returning to the discussion of Eryl's orange wind tunnel. I actually forgot about it completely until yesterday morning, when it floated back into my head in that half-awake state before I got out of bed. What I wanted to say is that the associations of both Svadhisthana and Yesod with the Moon and by extension dreams, and also with the birth canal seem very much in accord with the wind tunnel image. Eryl experienced this when she was in a dream-state induced by morphine, and was in the hospital experiencing what I can only imagine must have been a death/rebirth sort of ordeal. (Please correct me if I'm wrong, Eryl.)

I also wanted to give credit to the other bloggers who brought the color orange into my sphere. (Aside: I find it amusing that Blogger's grammar-checker underlines the word "blogger" as being a non-word.) There are more than just the ones mentioned here, but these are the most noteworthy.

One of the more amusing orange-related posts came from Kat, at The Bobwhites, and was titled Oh Noes! The Dreaded Orange Spot. Kat had been venturing into soapmaking, and this post was about "DOS" - which is what soapmakers actually call it - and it is something mysterious that happens when your soap doesn't quite come together as it should. Somehow, Kat and I ended up in a conversation about a children's book we would write together about a young bar of soap that has to battle with Spot, the Dreaded Orange Dragon. Proof positive that orange is the color of silliness. As well as soap disease, apparently.

And finally, I would be remiss if I did not also mention the lovely Jenny Stevning, who frequently uses orange in her WONDERFUL artwork, which is often achingly vibrant and moving. Visiting her blog has been a regular source of joy and inspiration for me.

There is just so much goodness in this orange blogosphere of ours, no?

Peeling the Orange: Bottom Half

2010-01-31T22:10:00.000-07:00

When I began to look more deeply into the orange, Googling brought me immediately to the second chakra, called Svadhisthana, whose color is orange. (If you don't know what a chakra is, go here.)

symbol for Svadhisthana

This chakra is also associated with the ninth sephirah of the Tree of Life, Yesod. The attributes and themes of Svadhisthana and Yesod are quite similar. Both are associated with the Moon, for one thing, which I find interesting, since the moon often looks orange. Not so incidentally, this weekend saw the biggest and brightest full moon of 2010, with orange-appearing Mars right next to it. The reason the moon looked bigger and brighter is because it was closer to the Earth than it usually is. This also means higher and lower tides, and I feel like it's been that way in my life lately. I've definitely been having a high tide of orange and inspiration, but also a low tide in terms of energy and emotion.

The truly useful information about Svadhisthana/Yesod for me is that they are both related to energy centers in the pelvic region of the body. Svadhisthana is called "one's own abode," the "seat of life," the origin in the body of chi or the lifeforce, and is associated with emotions, relationships, dualities of all kinds, and with water.

The Waterfall

by Kahlil Gibran

(I found this on a great blog called Heartsteps,

which Dan Gurney called my attention to recently.)

Yesod is "Foundation," and has been referred to by at least one Kabbalist as "the Translator," because it's seen as a bridge between spiritual energies/ideals and their manifestation in the human being and therefore in the world, the Malkuth (or Shekhinah) realm.

In order to make an attempt at brevity (hahaha), there's a lot I'm leaving out of this discussion (including the strong association for both Yesod and Svadhisthana with sexuality.) I am grossly generalizing and broadly summarizing; all of this is more intricate than I'm making it appear. Part of this intricacy is that different sources interpret different ways, especially with the Kabbalah. That's one of the beautiful things about Judaism, in my view. It's very open to creative interpretation, and encourages that more than other religions seem to. Anyway, I've included the above links if you want more thorough information.

My focus, what is most helpful to me in this exploration, is the series of exercises I've discovered, both physical and spiritual, whose purpose is the healthy flow of energy in and from this area of the body, and thus a healthier emotional state. According to several sources, the pelvis and hips constitute a region where old emotions can be stored and eventually stuck. I have had lower back and hip problems since I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, so this speaks to me.

The descriptions I've read of what happens when the second chakra is too open (overly emotionally reactive, too absorptive of others' emotions) and too closed (shut down, apathetic, cold) both fit me. I go back and forth between these states, and what is between them is anger and irritability. Last year, when I was in the Malkuth/Shekhinah "class" in the mystical school of life, I learned how the physical world (especially my own body) works. This year's class, which is teaching me to use some new tools to add to the set, is a continuation which makes perfect and uncanny sense, since Yesod is just above Malkuth on the Tree of Life. My sap is rising.

The Translator aspect of Yesod speaks to me as well. I need to be able to take the amazing ideas and energies that I stir around in my head, and translate them into manifest form, some kind of creative action. Writing is a primary expression for me, but it can't just be that. This is my year of quiet love. To learn to love quietly, I need to balance my emotional state and find a flow of love-energy that can be expressed naturally, through many means, not just words.

This morning in church, one of the scriptures was the famous 1 Corinthians 13, the "love" passage. I was struck by Paul's analogy of the gong, that one can have brilliance with words and ideas, but without love, it's worth exactly nothing: it's like a noisy gong. Wayne, the pastor, demonstrated during the children's sermon with a cheap little clangy gong compared to a Tibetan singing bowl. I have been feeling gong-like lately, especially around my family. I want to be a singing bowl.

I need to be able to feel the people around me without drowning in it or shutting myself down when it's all too much. I need a vibrancy and vitality that flows out of me and doesn't just get stuck in my head. Spiritual concepts, no matter how elevated, are no good at all if they are not expressed in concrete action. And the time for that action has come. What good is peeling an orange if you don't eat it?

The trick now is to get all of this wonderful information from my head into the rest of my body. My brain has been overstimulated with this stuff, and I have yet to actually apply it and do the friggin' exercises. My body, my emotions, and my energy level are suffering for it.

The word Svadhisthana means sweetness. This is a sweetness not only to consume but to share. I've peeled the orange; now it's time to take it in and let its nutrients move through my body, into my heart, and emanate to others through my very skin.

Bhramari Devi, Hindu bee goddess.

She is a manifestation of Kundalini:

the buzzing of her bees ascends up the spine,

awakening the chakras.

Peeling the Orange: Top Half

2010-01-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

It makes sense, I suppose, that in January, the deepest month of housebound winter, I would have the richest inner life. This is the second January in a row that incredible inspiration and interlacing have sent me on a mysterious yet practical journey.

It all started the day I did my Epiphany house blessing. Remember how I used a colored pencil because I didn't have any chalk? Do you remember what color it was? That's right, it was orange. Why orange? I didn't choose it for its significance, but mainly because it was the first light-colored pencil I came across. Then later that day I found a poem that I wanted to print out and put on my wall for the year. The only paper I had was bright orange, left over from a multi-colored pack I got a long time ago. That was when I started thinking Hmmm. Is this going to be an orange year?

By now you know me well enough to see where this is headed. Orange. A color I've never thought much about, and all of a sudden, I'm surrounded by it. I don't understand what it is about the blogosphere that seems to mystically corral themes into these little bays that I unsuspectingly swim into, but I like it. And speaking of the blogosphere, it has not escaped my attention that Blogger's primary color is orange. The combination of this with the orange pencil and paper immediately put it into mind that orange is my color for writing.

When I was homeschooling my oldest daughters, my very favorite thing to do was design unit studies. There's just something about taking a theme and running with it, following where it leads, that satisfies me like nothing else. But this is my first time with a color. And what a journey it's been so far. I can't even include all the places it's taken me, it's just too much. And while it's fascinating to me, I doubt all of it would be to you. Check out this clustering exercise I did with it though, and you'll get a sense of what I mean (you might even see your own name in this):

It's actually quite fitting that I did this, because clustering is a method of connecting and also dividing themes, and one of the main things I've realized about the meaning of the color orange is that it both divides and connects.

One of the most obvious ways that orange divides is in the lines down the middle of the road. A more symbolic way that was brought to my attention recently was in a post at Diamonds in the Sky With Lucy, in which she described an experience of visiting with "prisoners in orange jump suits, some angry and entitled – others grateful to be alive and willing to transform one day at a time – some both. The only thing separating them and me is the color of their suit." Interestingly, this observation on Lucy's part indicates that she ultimately found a way to connect with the prisoners.

I've already mentioned writing, which is a major way of connecting for me, and also Blogger's prevalence of orange. The Internet in general seems to favor orange, and of course, is a very popular tool for connecting with others these days. Another example of orange's connectivity would be school buses, which connect students with the school. Orange is a major color of transportation (a form of connecting us to places) in general, is it not?

Which brings up Eryl at The Kitchen Bitch Ponders, who posted about her recent experience of being on morphine in the hospital and finding herself in an "orange wind tunnel." Another kind of transportation altogether. I'll come back to this in my next post.

After reading Lucy's and Eryl's posts, the orange thing moved more to the forefront of my conscious contemplation. And then I happened to read Life of Pi, a book which I spontaneously picked off my shelf one day, knowing nothing about it except that it was supposed to be really good, and guess what? It's about a guy stuck with an orange tiger on a lifeboat full of orange things. The narrator (who is Hindu, Christian, and Muslim) discusses this:

It seems orange--such a nice Hindu color--is the color of survival because the whole inside of the boat and the tarpaulin and the life jackets and the lifebuoy and the oars and most every other significant object aboard was orange. Even the plastic, beadless whistles were orange.

Oh boy. I could gleefully (and I think orange is the color of glee) write a whole paper about the symbolism of orange in this incredible novel. But for our purposes, I will just point out that the presence of these orange objects on the boat (with the exception of the tiger) is for the sole aim of connecting the survivor(s) with a rescuer. Also, and this does play into the novel quite a bit, a lifeboat can be a kind of prison, meaning that the function of the orange objects is the survivor's liberation.

One direction this novel brought me was toward tigers. We are actually about to enter the Chinese Year of the Tiger, which gives me pause. I thought about one of my favorite paintings of Father Bill:

Long story short, Sadhu Sundar Singh was an Indian Sikh who, at fifteen, had a profound vision of Jesus after having previously violently persecuted Christians. He immediately converted to Christianity and then spent the rest of his life talking passionately and poetically about Christ to anyone who would listen. He also wrote, mostly parables. His life was marked by strange and mystical occurrences, some of which are documented and some which are considered legend. This painting depicts what Father Bill referred to as Singh's mystical meeting with the tiger. Singh often used the tiger as a symbol of the violence and primal voraciousness in human nature.

Tigers are symbols of many things, but one of the most obvious is danger. The association of orange with danger is also widespread. Let's not forget about Agent Orange or the Orange Order in Northern Ireland. Orange may be the color of survival, but it's also a color of war, violence, and even death. It's the primary color of Halloween, after all.

Orange is therefore also the color of fear, but this can, with a different perspective, be translated into alertness, noticing. Which brings me back to the orange on the lifeboat. In order to connect the survivor with a rescuer, attention must be drawn to the survivor's vehicle. This is also the purpose of the many orange signs and symbols that exist on the road. Pay attention, approach with caution. (Interestingly, the orange traffic light - I'm sorry, it is NOT yellow - not only signifies caution, but it divides - connects? - the stop and the go. It asks you to decide which you're going to do. Will you speed up or come to a halt?)

Another way of expressing alertness is wakefulness. And isn't there something in us that associates orange with mornings, when the orange sun comes up and we drink our orange juice? Then consider the color of a Buddhist monk's robe, garb which signifies a life of dedication to spiritual awakening.

So, putting aside the more personal and tangential directions I've taken this, let's review for a moment: Orange (so far) symbolically relates to:

connection/division
imprisonment/freedom
danger/safety
survival/death
transportation (movement/stopping)
fear/wakefulness

I have no grand summary of Ultimate Meaning here, but it's been a boatload of fun playing with these ideas and images. I'm beginning to think that orange is the color of synchronicity/serendipity/interlacing.

This journey actually has led me to some very practical applications, but I don't want to take you there just yet. Because, let's face it: orange, maybe more than anything else, is silly. I mean, Tigger's orange, as my son pointed out.

And speaking of silly, here's one of my all-time favorite jokes:
Q: What does an orange cone on the side of the road mean?
A: "Psychedelic witch embedded in asphalt."

I'll leave you with this, which I dedicate to Dan Gurney, who reintroduced the poetic Tanka form to me recently:

Lines Written on the Hem

of a Buddhist Monk's Robe

Just because we know

that orange rhymes with nothing,

denotates two ways,
segments and defines the road;
orange is a sweet koan.

Me in my orange bandanna.
I'm counting Tanka syllables.

The Body, the Shekhinah, and Father Bill: A 2009 Retrospective

2010-01-23T10:34:00.000-07:00

This time last year I was incredibly isolated and just beginning to fully recognize the effects of my black sludge moods on those I love. I had lived in Taos for only a few months, was working at Subway (!) and struggling to survive, was getting my arse kicked by winter, and generally not having a good time of it.

But then I decided to get proactive about my life. I visited with a couple of alternative health practitioners and got some recommendations about how to change my diet and my attitude. I began to embrace my physical being in a way I never had before. I read voraciously anything related to eating, from the health-oriented to the political. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Harvest For Hope by Jane Goodall. The Art of the Inner Meal: Eating As A Spiritual Path by Don Altman. Eat Right 4 Your Type by Peter D'Adamo. Information about pH balance in the body, about veganism, about Ayurveda, about fasting and cleansing, about the global food crisis, the importance of eating locally produced food.

As I researched and experimented with different ways of eating, I finally found the way that's right for me, and it changed my life profoundly. I learned to listen to my body more deeply and to trust its knowing. I began to see life as a body adventure, and was amazed to realize how much simply changing my diet changed the way I felt emotionally and spiritually. It was humbling to realize that all my so-called spiritual methods of dealing with my mood/anger problem paled in its effects compared to just eating differently.

At the same time, I became acquainted with the Shekinah, and true to my peculiar path, she started popping up simply everywhere. The Shekinah, representative of the immanence of the divine in the physical world, was an absolutely fitting guide as I went about learning to live in harmony with my body. My big epiphany was that mind and body are one - not in the sense of two things united, but of ONE thing manifested as different aspects. Just as the Shekhinah is an aspect of the divine and not a separate thing or person.

This exploration led me deeper into mystical Judaism, something I had already been dabbling in for years. In the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the Shekhinah is associated with the tenth sephirah, Malkuth, or Kingdom. "She" is the manifestation of Spirit in the physical world. Suddenly, in the middle of a bleak January, I found myself deeply inspired and energized.

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life

One of the first things that led me into this exploration was a showing of the art of Father William Hart McNichols, an iconographer. The first or second week I lived in Taos, there was an article about him in the Taos News because his show was about to open. He's a Catholic priest who is known worldwide for the icons he paints. The odd thing about this is that the iconography tradition is Orthodox, not Catholic. The other odd thing is that many of his icons are not of traditionally recognized saints. One is of a Buddhist woman, one is of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, another is of an Islamic mystic. There's even one of Princess Diana. If you click on the above links, you can also read his commentary about each icon.

My magic mirror.

The two icons on the left side are by Father Bill

Father Bill, as he is called, is a wonderful, wise, poetic man. And openly gay. In fact, there is an article in Time magazine in which he discusses this. He's celibate, as a priest vows to be, but admits that his orientation is homosexual.

I rarely visit art shows, but I was determined to see his, and I'm glad I did.

The poster announcing Father Bill's show.

I snagged it from a coffee shop (with the owner's permission.)

Standing before the original icons was so much more powerful than looking at reproductions of them, particularly because of the real gold mixed in with the paint used for the halos. There was a sheet provided with background information on each of them. One of the icons was called, "The Name of God, Shekhinah" and was simply the Hebrew letters that spell that name. But his commentary on it was what I was really taken with and what set me off on the Shekhinah pilgrimage. He talked about seeing the Shekhinah in the mist that often rests on Taos Mountain, and in the glow of a candle. He talked about the Shekhinah being the feminine Spirit of God. In Jewish theology, she is the Bride of God, the Sabbath Bride, and women light candles on the Sabbath eve to welcome her in.

I was and am utterly smitten with Father Bill. (Leave it to me to develop a crush on a gay priest.) I felt a connection to him right from that first article I read, but then kind of forgot about him. Then, one morning during Advent, I just happened to turn on the radio, which I rarely do when I'm home, and he was talking to Nancy Stapp, a wonderful local radio personality. He was discussing the meaning of Advent, and while I no longer remember exactly what he said, I remember being absolutely calmed and inspired by it, and consistently nodding and saying Yes, exactly, to the radio. And I remember he ended with an ancient Persian prayer to the sun.

A few months later during Lent, I had the same uncanny experience of turning on the radio, and lo, there he was talking to Nancy again, this time about the meaning of Lent. And he talked about the Shekinah.

Then, in June, I moved into the neighborhood of the St. Francis church and discovered that he is the assistant Priest for that parish.

Other than Christmas Midnight Mass, I've only been to mass there once, and he just happened to be preaching that day. And what he preached about was Sophia, the feminine personification of wisdom, often associated with the Shekhinah. He also talked about the tendency of religious people to be judgmental and stingy with their acceptance and forgiveness of others, to segregate and create an us versus them mentality. He told the congregation to go home and look up the word "catholic." Which, of course, I eagerly did. Here's what I found:

1. broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded, liberal
2. universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all.
3. pertaining to the whole Christian body or church.

Father Bill is a shining example of this kind of catholicity. And while we've never met, he was a profound influence on my growth over the past year, a journey which continues to bloom in unexpected and strangely harmonic ways, as you'll see in my next post.

But in the meantime, I'm curious - where were you a year ago? How has your life changed over the past year?

Illuminated Manuscripts Virtual Ribbon-Cutting

2010-01-21T14:39:00.001-07:00

The last couple of days have been productive. I brought the final draft of the case statement I've been working on for UNM-Taos to the Executive Director yesterday, and she loved it. The people I've been working with are really happy with my writing. This excites me because the stuff I'm doing is easy for me and I love doing it. Which has inspired me to finally get off my butt and start promoting my writing and editing business, Illuminated Manuscripts.

I went and joined the Chamber of Commerce today! I'm official! And I'm going to their monthly Mix and Meet this evening. I'm hoping not only to network about this business, but also to eventually find someone who wants to open a laundromat with me. Wish me luck.

And just now I got the blog for Illuminated Manuscripts ready for action and put my first post up. I'd love it if you guys would hop over there and let me know what you think. I'm open to any feedback you have. Criticisms, suggestions, whatever. And if you know anyone that needs writing or editing services, keep me in mind!

Virtual Visit

2010-01-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

To lighten the mood up around here, and because I said I would, this post is dedicated to fulfilling Lucy's Virtual Visit Challenge at her lovely blog, Diamonds in the Sky With Lucy.

Here are the rules she provided (I changed #5, Lucy - hope you don't mind):

1. Begin the challenge immediately.
2. Pick up your camera and take pictures of where you predominantly spend your time blogging. Include a forward facing, left and right side view.
3. Do NOT stop to tidy up, redecorate, make your bed or whatever you think needs to be done to impress others or sooth your Martha Stewart-ish ego.
4. Post your pictures (with a brief description if you like.)
5. Leave a comment on my blog letting me know you've done it.
6. Optional: Tag five other bloggers whose space you'd love to virtually visit.

When she issued the challenge a few days ago, I just happened to have my camera right next to me on the desk, so was able to do it immediately.

This is it, front view. I'm so excited I got to take a picture of my shiny new laptop that I got last week when my old crappy one finally keeled over and died.

Yes, that's a snow man up there. He is one of the two decorations I left up after Christmas, for two reasons: 1) Eliana is in love with snowmen right now, and 2) It's a statement in my protest against Christmas getting all the cool winter stuff.

The art on the wall is one of my favorites, and was the first piece of art I ever bought for myself after moving out of my parents' house. It's by Scott Mutter. The words at the bottom say:

BORN INTO THIS WORLD

WE CREATE ECHOS OF OUR INWARD YEARNINGS,

AND SHIFT ALONG THE AXIS

FROM MATTER TO SPIRIT.

I'm not fond of laptop mouses, which is why I have an external one plugged in.

Yes, that's a diaper on the desk.

And one of my collages on the wall back there.

My living room doesn't actually look like this anymore, as I moved the furniture around a couple of days ago.

So there you have it. This is where I am in the physical world when I'm connecting with you, dear readers.

I'm not going to tag anybody because I'd love to see ALL of your spaces, but I'll leave it up to you whether or not to participate.

The Epiphany Chronicles IV: The Intolerable Shirt of Flame

2010-01-13T09:26:00.001-07:00

Morning of January 11

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

~T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

After much deliberation about the meaning of "integrity," and with Justin's permission, I've decided to go ahead and post this. Because things are what they are, and the integrity of these chronicles requires it for completion. And because I truly think of you as my friends.

Fact is, as they say, stranger than fiction. In the biggest unexpected twist of these chronicles, especially since they were already mostly written when this happened, I experienced the following.

I went early to bring my beloved his mail from the box we share, and discovered him with another woman. Please bear in mind that we live apart and with no commitment to monogamy. But still. I was devastated.

This was the day I started to run.

I returned to my house after this shocking epiphany, shaken to the core, physically vibrating. And said to myself, I'm done.

I'm done.

I'm done.

I fired the censor and wrote every outrage of my incensed heart, and it was not the black sludge, it was the guileless child incarnate at last, that neglected stranger welcomed in.

It's done.

I'm done.

And then I said to myself and to God: Now what? What do I do with myself? I was still physically shaking. There was no way I could work like this or go pay bills or eat breakfast.

I had been thinking the night before that I'd like to start running. I had mentally plotted my course to and around the St. Francis church and then home a different way. Just like the Wise Men.

I've been reading The Way of the Beloved, and one of the recommended exercises for generating more love is to practice being grateful for “negative” things, to find something in them to be grateful for.

I am grateful for this heartbreaking epiphany because it impelled me to start running.

I walked down the street a bit, then broke into a run, crossed the board over the acequia into the little grove, through the grove, next to the graffittied adobe ruins, into the church parking lot. Something was going on at the church. A funeral. How fitting.

I ran a circle around the church, the hands of the saints reaching out to caress me through the adobe in which they forever live, back through the grove, stopped at a tree to stretch. My mind was graciously blank. The shaking was no longer trapped inside, but suspiring through my flesh.

Back out to the street, past my house, through the post office parking lot. I slowed to a walk down the highway, ran back into the church lot from this different direction. Around the courtyard again. Clare. Oh Clare, please pray for me. Mother of God, pray for me. Mama. And I'm not even Catholic. But it felt right and was medicine.

This running, this writing, are prayer and liberation.

Even in failure,

even in fear,

even in sorrow,

I have and am

- am because I have -

everything I need.

The light shines

in the darkness,

and the darkness

has not,

will not,

can not

overcome it.

I have and am

my whole

light in the darkness

self.

Thank you.

The Epiphany Chronicles III: The Impossible Union of Spheres of Existence

2010-01-11T16:00:00.004-07:00

Day of January 6

The Feast of the Epiphany

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time...

Music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood is Incarnation.

Here the impossible union.

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled.

~T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"

I woke the morning after my nightmare refreshed and calm, with more energy and clarity than I'd had in a few days. My goal for the day was to get caught up on my grantwriting work and do a house blessing, a traditional ritual for Epiphany. But when I looked around my house, I realized neither of these things were going to get done unless I cleaned first.

What was I going to do with all this stuff?

The house was chaos, most of it worse than this table. But I was apprehensive about starting to clean because I knew once I started, it could go on all day. If it hadn't been for the house blessing plan, I probably would have ignored it and worked instead, but there was no way I was going to bless a dirty house. So I took a deep breath and plunged in. I tidied and mirted (opposite of "trimmed") the Christmas tree and put away all the decorations and washed dishes and rearranged shelves and furniture and vacuumed and swept and blogged in between tasks.

I found a perfectly intact dead bee on top of a pile of stuff in the recycling bin. What the heck was a bee doing out here in the middle of January? At first I thought it was alive, it was so perfect. If you're not acquainted with my connection to bees, read this. Most people would probably not find much significance in a dead bee, but for me it was a definite message, an alert. The last time a dead bee came to me so clearly, I was making a three-dimensional medicine shield collage and needed something for the center of it. I walked outside barefoot and was stung by a bee I stepped on. But amazingly, it wasn't crushed and it ended up in the center of my shield, just where it belonged. It was the first and only time I've ever been stung by a bee.

The first time I checked my email that morning, there was a new post announced on The Website of Unknowing, called "Dark Epiphany." Since I was processing the nightmare, I was very curious about this. Turns out, it tied in perfectly with my "dark epiphany" of the night before. Carl McColman, the author of that site, says, "struggling with the absence of God is a way of experiencing God’s presence. Call it a dark epiphany, perhaps. We fool ourselves if we think that God only shows up in the light."

This also ties in nicely with the comments some folks have left on my previous two posts in these chronicles. A dark epiphany is still an epiphany to be welcomed.

Then, a little later, I read Rebecca's Epiphany post on Whatever else my life is....it is also this dazzling darkness. She says:

Having the aha moment or the great epiphany can be very exciting. Having all of the puzzle pieces fall into place after a long discernment or just receiving the grace of an understanding from seemingly nowhere can be a spiritual and emotional thrill. But, it seems to me that most of my epiphanies have brought with them an invitation to change and to transform. They come for my benefit and for the benefit of the world, and so I am asked to act. That action usually requires courage, integrity and discipline.

I cleaned some more, pondering all of this. During my next break, through investigating the blog of one of other commenters on "Dark Epiphany," I clicked a link called The Bee Goddess, where I read that in ancient Crete, " the bee signified the life that comes from death." Discussing a golden seal found buried with the dead in that culture, the author describes the image on it: "The bee goddess, the figure in the center descending to earth among snakes and lilies, is being worshipped by her priestesses, who, characteristically, take the same form as she does, all raising their ‘hands’ in the typical gesture of epiphany." Snakes and lilies; this spoke to me. Would it be over the top to mention that my name, Susan, means "lily?" And that lilies symbolize forgiveness and purity?

And then I remembered a small piece of what I had read in my daily prayer book, Celtic Benedictions, the night before the dream. I went back and looked at it. Just before going to sleep, I had prayed this with the words of the book:

Let me learn of you in the soil of my soul, O Christ,
and your journey through death to birth.
Let me learn of you in my soul this night
and the journey of letting go...

...Set free my dreams of the unknown.
Safeguard this time of resting, O God,
enfold me in the darkness of the night.

Astonishing. My dreams of the unknown were certainly set free, just not in the way I would have chosen. I was definitely enfolded in the darkness of the night. I was also “safeguarded”, but again, not in a way I would expect, or normally associate with that word. And after I went back to sleep that night, my rest was deep and whole.

This is when I got the overwhelming sense that my epiphany experiences thus far were asking to be written and shared. It was an uncomfortable thought, and was definitely an action requiring "courage, integrity and discipline." It was becoming more and more apparent to me that there was real significance to my experiences over the past couple of days. But what was I going to do with all this stuff? How to create the impossible union of spheres of existence?

I began to process all of it in earnest. As outwardly I cleaned and organized my house, I inwardly ordered my mind and heart. I mused about the meaning of Epiphany.

I've mentioned before that one of the big appeals of religion for me is entering into the narratives of my tradition, Christianity. The Epiphany narrative is of the Three Wise Men following the star and coming to see the Christ-child. I've heard that they didn't actually get there until Jesus was two and the family was living in a house, which I kind of like. I am amused by the image of Jesus as a toddler, fondling a chunk of gold and then trying to smash it on the floor, or flinging frankincense around the room with gleeful abandon.

At any rate, the rationale of the house blessing follows from this story. This ritual, which I'd been planning for days, now seemed even more important and meaningful after my experience of the previous night.

It was mid-afternoon before I got to a satisfactory stopping point with the cleaning (no, it is never "finished"), and prepared for the house blessing. I used a ritual from the book To Dance With God, by Gertrud Mueller. There's a little bit of liturgy to recite, and then you're supposed to go around the house with incense, or sprinkling holy water in every room while consciously blessing that space. Then you're supposed to take a piece of chalk that you've blessed and write above the main entrances of the house, the year and the initials of the three wise men (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar) like this:

20 + C + M + B + 10

It seemed a little weird to me, this last part, but what the heck. I didn't have a piece of chalk so I used an orange colored pencil. Very lightly.

I visited each room with a sage smudge stick a soul-friend of mine made for me and which I'd never used, and wafted the smoke with the large wild turkey feather I found last fall in the grove by the St. Francis church. Then I carried a silver bowl of water that I keep by my bed to enhance my dreams, and sprinkled some in every room. I finished by ringing a little bell in each room. Maybe all of this sounds goofy to you, but it felt great. My house felt so clean and calm and clear and fresh at the end of it all. I was really really glad I'd spent the day this way. And I began more and more to see that dream as a gift.

I also anointed myself with frankincense essential oil, a fitting gesture, I thought, for an Epiphany celebration. But what struck me was that I REALLY like the way it smells. And it's the same smell that it was 2000-odd years ago when it was offered as a gift by the wise men. Through a little research I discovered that "the mythical Phoenix bird was thought to build its funeral pyre out of frankincense and myrrh". Also, that it was used in pagan purification ceremonies in many cultures. Purification. Yes.

Now it was time for the kids to come home, and to get ready for the Epiphany service that my church was holding that evening.

When I entered the quiet, candlelit church, the atmosphere of peace resonated with the clean quiet of my heart. My mind was not quite as clear. I was holding the big question at bay, Should I, can I, continue with Justin? The Applebees fiasco was still with me, asking me to see the reality – that despite our best intentions, we harm each other in a way that shuts us both down. And no matter how much progress we seem to make, these instances set us back to square one. I wasn't exactly fighting this recognition, but laying it aside for the moment, letting these unfolding experiences work on me and bring me the answers deeper than intellect or willful resolve.

The pastor, Wayne, was dressed in a simple white robe with a cord of rope around his waist, not what he usually wears. The service was simple and prayerful. Wayne played a song on his guitar and sang – things I had never witnessed him do.

The scripture was from Isaiah 60:

Arise, shine! For your light has come,

and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth,

and thick darkness the peoples;

but the Lord will arise upon you,

and his glory will appear over you...

I felt tears welling up and looked down at my lap, lest someone notice. And then Wayne read:

Lift up your eyes and look around;

they all gather together, they come to you...

Then you shall see and be radiant;

your heart shall thrill and rejoice.

I was moved to my toes. I lifted my eyes and saw quiet love. Wayne began speaking, what he spoke of was not the gifts of the wise men, or the brilliance of the star, but of Herod. For those of you not familiar with the story, when the wise men come at last into Jerusalem, they go to King Herod to inquire of the whereabouts of the “new king” that has been born. Herod, afraid of this potential threat to his authority, tells them that once they find this child, they should report back to him. Once he knows where the child is, his plan is to kill him. The Wise Men, being wise, realize the malicious intent in Herod, and return to their homeland “by a different way,” to avoid Herod.

Something that has struck me since that night is that the Wise Men were strangers to the land, aliens, and must have seemed especially so when they showed up at Mary and Joseph's doorstep. But they were welcomed, just as I must welcome the strangers in my own soul.

What Wayne preached about was Herod's fear, how everything he is reported in the Bible to have done was out of fear. How even in the joy of the nativity story, there is the backdrop of shadows and death. How we all live against this backdrop. Darkness creates fear in the human heart, he said, using the example of a child wanting to leave the lights on at night because the monsters grow larger in the dark. But, he said, fear also creates darkness, it works the other way too. And yet, there is this glorious light beyond all light, that is real, and all we have to do is find the courage to lift our eyes to behold it. All we have to do is trust it, and then there it is.

And there it was.

And here it is.

No simple answers, only “hints followed by guesses,” but in the weeping, in the lifting of eyes, the impossible union beheld.

The Epiphany Chronicles II: Menaced by Monsters

2010-01-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

Night of January 5/6

We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

In the middle, not only the middle of the way

But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment...

...The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires.
~T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"

I am in a dismal psychiatric hospital with dingy yellow stained walls and seizured fluorescent lights. A variety of infirm people are milling about in a commons area.

I'm not a patient, and I have some kind of purpose here, but I don't know what it is. I'm trying to leave but patients keep detaining me, trying to tell me their stories. I need to get back to my children, I say. I've been gone too long.

Something is amiss, there's some sort of threat being announced. Someone is attacking. I begin to move out of the commons area into the hallway, and they're saying it's a lock-down, that no one can leave. I have a growing sense of the presence of evil, and of being trapped. I must escape.

As I move into the hallway, chaos is building, and there are more people, all rushing in different directions. I'm trying to move past them, get to the doorway at the end of the hall. I notice a figure to my left. She's skinny, blonde, and ugly, with gaping pale blue eyes, and she's carrying a small black to-go box containing an iceberg lettuce salad. She's not human. She's an evil creature; I can feel it, and I'm terrified. She seems fake, like she's made out of heavy rubber.

She's inching up behind someone, sniffing at the back of their head with horrible intent. She catches me looking at her, and then throws some of the lettuce toward me. I'm doomed. She moves toward me and I know I will not leave this place alive. I know she has the strength to do with me what she will, and there's no point in fighting it.

I say something to her, how I know that she can throw me against the wall and kill me in an instant, and she says, "I don't have to." Just then, I notice huge rusted pipes, the thickness of barrels, lining the wall of the hallway. They begin to creak and rumble, and I realize that they're filled with water. They're about to send a force of rushing water through the building that will quickly drown everyone there.

"Here it comes..." she says.

And I woke up.

The evil black sludge had filled my bedroom, it was a tangible presence, and I was frozen. I haven't had a nightmare like this in a very long time. There have been times when I've sensed the presence of evil on the perimeter of my awareness, and deliberately pushed it away, but now it encompassed me, and I couldn't even get out of bed.

My first rational thoughts were that a) It's the night before Epiphany, and I have had an epiphany of evil, and b) if evil has actual substance and presence, how much more does God have, the divine love and goodness.

I made myself get up eventually, and I went to the living room to ponder and pray. I wrenched myself away from the sludge enough to turn my thoughts and heart toward God, toward the quiet love I have avowed myself to. I thought of a scene in Paulo Coelho's novel, Brida, in which the heroine must spend the night in the forest alone. At first she is terrified with the sounds and the shadows of the night, but then she realizes that she has the CHOICE of how to feel, that if she turns her mind and heart toward love and beauty and goodness and joy, then that is where she will be. Because it's real. She eventually falls asleep in peace.

I also thought of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, who witnesses a manifestation of evil among his fellows, and can never embrace them again, even though he's not sure if it really happened or if he dreamed it.

Sitting here now, several days later, in the comfort of distance and day, it's easy for me to see how I manifested the nightmare in response to the events of the day before. The deep fears and pain that I had given up trying to control were leaking out. Threatening to rush out, in fact, as if from huge rusty pipes, and drown me. I have had several insights into the meaning of this dream just by writing about it here. But I can't write it off as merely "psychological." It was a manifestation of evil that was not merely within me. It had a presence of its own.

I don't want to get into armchair theology of evil just now, because that would diminish the actual experience and what it meant to me. Besides, I don't even know how to distinguish between "within" and "without" when an issue comes to this level. The sludge was definitely in the room, but isn't the room "in me" in the most profound sense?

As awful as this experience was, it showed me my spiritual growth, because I didn't just run and turn on a light and try to externally comfort myself. I never even looked at the clock. I also didn't sit and try to analyze it, to think it away. I immediately went to God, to divine love for that comfort. I leaned into myself to the source instead of outwardly to some illusion of control. And this deliberate invocation of divine love was much more effective and comforting than turning on a few lights and telling myself it was nothing. It didn't make the sense of evil "go away," but rather came into that evil and illuminated it. Experiencing the substance of evil confirmed for me at a deep level the substance of God. The light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

The Epiphany Chronicles I: The Disconsolate Chimera

2010-01-09T11:38:00.002-07:00

January 4

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

~T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

The day went well until the afternoon, when I began to feel exceedingly tired and grumpy, and it got progressively worse as day went down to evening. This went beyond a simple mood or a physical state even though I kept trying to tell myself I was just “tired” as a way to stop my fouled mind from traveling down negative paths. I felt as though I was doused in an evil black sludge and could barely move under it.

There was a time when I operated under something like this a large portion of the time, and then it seemed normal to me, because I was so utterly unaware in that state. Amazingly, I didn't even think I felt bad when I was like that. The main reasons I'm aware of it now are that a) I've grown to the point where I don't fall into that state very often so it's more obvious when I do, and b) I've hurt people I love by things I've done under that thick spiritual smog, and they've let me know. Thank God.

I hadn't found myself in a state this awful in a long time. And I couldn't make it go away.

I was supposed to go out to dinner with my beloved that night; we'd been planning it for days and had already had to reschedule a couple of times. I was determined to go, and since I've taken on this theme of “quiet love” for 2010, I convinced myself that I could control the intense negativity that I was feeling.

You can probably guess how well that worked. Sigh. I can hear you saying, "No, Susan, don't do it!" I wish you'd been there that night.

We wanted to go to the Ranchos Plaza Grill, next to the St. Francis church. It has the best traditional New Mexican food I've ever had, a cozy warm ambiance created by the soft adobe walls, old wood floors, and simple Spanish guitar. I was especially looking forward to the pinto beans. Mmmm.

Alas – they were closed. So we drove, and drove, and ended up at Applebees. It seems like we always end up there. Justin really likes it. I don't mind it most of the time, but was not much in the mood that night, given the circumstances. And unfortunately, it was “game night,” meaning that in addition to the annoying pop music puffing through the speakers, there was also a very loud (football?) game showing on the TV.

Even so, I made it through most of the dinner without being entirely negative, but I kept very consciously biting my tongue. And then I didn't. And it all spiraled downward until I was saying unkind things and hating myself for it and then finding myself in tears and running out of the restaurant while Justin paid the bill.

I was utterly horrified and couldn't even begin to fathom how I'd let myself fall into this when I knew – I KNEW – better. And had been consciously, deliberately, carefully controlling myself.

What I then had to realize, my unhappy epiphany, was that as much as I might want to wish away some of the deep fears and pain I have collected, it just doesn't work that way, and at a point of least resistance, usually with a loved one, it's going to come out. And when it does, it ruins everything, and pushes people away. For Justin, because of some of his childhood issues, it makes him unable to trust my “quiet love,” and makes healing just that much farther out of reach for both of us.

Other times that things like this have happened, I've immediately starting telling myself hopeful stories about what I'll do differently next time, and subtly justifying myself to myself. But there was something about the intensity and stark obviousness of where I actually WAS this time that made it impossible for me to do that. No amount of analysis or resolve was going to change it. It's deeper than the part of my mind that engages in those activities. So deep it scares me. There was nothing for me to do but surrender my efforts to control and change it, and simply accept that, even with the (painfully slow) progress I've made in this area, it's still Part of Who I Am. Yuck. It's part of who I am.

And this is not a happy ending.

But it might be a good beginning.

Found In Translation

2010-01-05T21:55:00.000-07:00

I'm a research junkie and a total word nerd. In the icebreaker game of a discussion group once, I had to pick an adjective to describe myself that started with the same letter as my name. Just call me "Searching Susan." I once took an online I.Q. test that titled me "Word Warrior" based on my score.

When I was in graduate school, I spent an absurd amount of time researching and writing about one of the earliest Old English poems, "The Dream of the Rood." Two semesters' worth of research and writing, actually. I could have turned it into a thesis, as one of my professors kept suggesting. When I first started the project, I was supposed to do a lexical analysis of the piece for my History of the English Language class. I was trying to show that there were Celtic as well as Anglo-Saxon influences on the poem. So I got an Old English dictionary and eventually ended up doing my own translation of the whole 256 lines. Yes, you read that right - two HUNDRED and fifty-six.

The Ruthwell Cross,

on which part of "The Dream of the Rood" is inscribed in runes.

Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Photo by Peter Mattock

on Flickr

What I discovered was that certain words had multiple senses to them, and that none of the available translations emphasized this. Granted, it's a difficult thing to do, but I, being the word ~~nerd~~ warrior that I am, took on the task. It was immensely rewarding to find ways to unfold levels and layers of meaning. And I was able to support my claims of Celtic influence pretty darn well this way.

More recently, I've read a couple of books by Neil Douglas-Klotz, in which he translates various words of Jesus into the Aramaic that Jesus would have been speaking in when he lived, and from there into English. The result is quite poetic and illuminated. For instance, here's his translation of the Lord's Prayer:

O, Birther of the Cosmos, focus your light within us -- make it useful
Create your reign of unity now
Your one desire then acts with ours,
As in all light,
So in all forms,
Grant us what we need each day in bread and insight:
Loose the cords of mistakes binding us,
As we release the strands we hold of other's guilt.
Don't let surface things delude us,
But free us from what holds us back.
From you is born all ruling will,
The power and the life to do,
The song that beautifies all,
From age to age it renews.
I affirm this with my whole being.

When I first started studying the Bible with a Strong's Concordance handy, you can probably imagine how ecstatic I was. I would spend whole afternoons looking up every word in a single verse, and feel like I was digging up ancient treasure. Word archaeology.

I wrote two full pages in my notebook about the name "Jesus." I don't remember the whole rabbit trail now, but the general gist was that it means "open, wide, and free." At least that was what I took from it.

I began to see an analogy between words and computer icons. The way you can click on something and it opens up a whole new world that you couldn't have imagined when you were just looking at the icon.

Why is she going off about all this? you might well ask. Well, the other day, I was doing my evening prayer with the book a friend gave me for Christmas, Celtic Benedictions, by J. Philip Newell. This radiant little book of morning and evening prayer is decorated throughout with images from the 7th century Lindisfarne Gospels. Anyway, I looked up the verse featured that evening: "I commune with my heart in the night, I meditate and search my spirit" (Psalm 77:6).

In my New Revised Standard Version Bible there was a note about "I commune," an alternate translation of it, which I read as "My music spirit searches." I found this odd, but poetic and inspiring. It took me a minute to realize that because of how these notes are laid out on the page, I was actually reading it wrong. The alternate translation for "I commune" was simply "My music," and for "search my spirit," it was "my spirit searches." So the verse would then read, "My music is with my heart in the night; I meditate and my spirit searches." The New International Version actually translates this verse as "I remembered my songs in the night. My heart mused and my spirit inquired."

Maybe all of this doesn't excite you like it does me, but it's this kind of stuff that brings the Bible alive for me. For some, it's this very thing that confirms their rejection of the Bible as scripture, but for me, it emphasizes poetic truth as what's valuable over hard fact. There's grace and mystery in it, not fixed formulaic answers.

Much has been made of what gets lost in translation, but I'm here to say that a lot can be found. I research and explore this way because it's fun, and makes me feel like I'm peering into a divine kaleidoscope. My music spirit searches, and finds communion in and with the words.

Naming the Day

2010-01-03T17:44:00.001-07:00

I wonder in which season

I will die.

One is as fitting as the next,

as unthinkable.

This is what I think of

in the clean cold start

of the new year, the last

of the first

decade of a new

old millennium.

The year, the earth, are always

beginning and ending, as the days

spin ever faster

and time is the umbrella

that keeps the stars

from falling willy-nilly.

Every year goes

the way of candle flame.

Every day, every life—begging

the question,

When the flame is blown out,

where does the light go?

Still the candle of my clay heart kindles,

this clean quiet is alive,

and everything that circles

is also still.

I feast on deepest hungers,

sweet white stars, the flesh of words

in the glowing season,

now fulfilled

and purged.

Naming this day as the beginning,

I choose to say I give

this year to quiet love. I will

down more starry water,

spill less

anger.

I wake asking

Where are the gifts I gave you,

where are your gifts to me?

I cannot hold them.

I cannot hold the answers.

All I can say is one day

not far from the present

when winter begins

to dream

its death

as the carnival parade keeps dreaming

an unthinkable trip up the skull

I recognize my birth,

inherit a new age,

blow out the candles.

Wrapping Up Christmas

2009-12-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

This will be the last of my Christmas posts, although I may do an Epiphany one, but I wanted to share a couple of things before we say our final goodbyes to Christmas 2009. It has always bothered me that Christmas ends so abruptly after Christmas Day; every year I try to drag it out a little. I ponder the "Twelve Days of Christmas" concept, and try to find a way to bring it into my life more fully. But the world has other ideas, and it's difficult to swim against that flow.

Another thing that's been bothering me lately is that many of the songs associated with Christmas are actually WINTER songs, and have nothing especially to do with Christmas. I wish these songs were played all winter long; maybe then we could collectively celebrate this wonderful season a bit more, instead of dreading it as soon as Christmas is over. I mean, winter's just started, for crying out loud - let's enjoy it. Let's single Jingle Bells, Sleigh Ride, Let It Snow, Winter Wonderland, and Baby, It's Cold Outside all winter long! Anybody with me here?

Anyway, for those of you who asked for my Eggnog Cheesecake recipe, here it is.

You'll notice I crossed out the shortbread cookies and toasted hazelnuts ingredients and replaced them with Pecan Sandies. I did this because I've never been able to find hazelnuts that weren't still in their shells, and I'm lazy. The Pecan Sandies work just fine. This year is actually the first time I've done the toasted hazelnuts because someone brought me a huge bag of shelled ones, and I'm telling you - it wasn't significantly better.

And just for the Postman, here is the Bourbon Fruitcake recipe, taken from Jeff Smith's wonderful book, "The Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas." I know there's some scandal associated with Smith, but I still adore this book, and him. May he rest in peace. Whatever he did or didn't do is not for me to judge; but I can judge him by his writing, which in this book is quite inspired.

Don't forget that you can click on these photos to enlarge them if they're difficult to read.

I'd also like to share a poem by W.H. Auden, called "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio." This poem closes Smith's book, and that's where I know it from.

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes--
Some have gotten broken--and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week--
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted--quite unsuccessfully--
To love all our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers.
                                                        Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed.
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility--once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep his word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off.
                                                       But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this.
                                                       To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever to pray to the Father;
"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."

They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon;
When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, that, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

May you have a fruitful and joyous new year,

and in the words of Jeff Smith,

I bid you peace.

Of Messes, Masses, and Ships

2009-12-29T18:52:00.006-07:00

Christmas this year, like every year, was messy. But it's a mess I'm learning to surrender to. In the imperfect and often sloppy, can be beauty and joy.

We made a mess of gingerbread cookies early in the season. They didn't look like the cookies in the Christmas books, but they were fun to make and eat. Even my 16-year-old's ubercool boyfriend helped.

One of my goals this year was to make a photo calendar for the relatives, but with the messiness of end-of-semester insanity at the same time as Christmas preparations, it didn't happen. I kept trying to get everyone in the same place at the same time to take one good family photo with a Christmas theme for the December page. The day when I finally managed to gather everyone, Eliana was tired and fussy. After about thirty (wasted) shots, these were the only two that came out anywhere near presentable.

But by the time I actually got these on my computer, there wasn't enough time to get the calendar out by Christmas and I was swamped with other things, so the project was abandoned. Oh well, maybe next year.

Because June Amber had to work on Christmas Day, we decided to have our big dinner on Christmas Eve. But I also knew that my beloved's mother was coming to town on or shortly after Christmas Day, so I bought a prime rib and a turkey. Well, actually, two turkeys, since it was buy one, get one free. We had the prime rib Christmas Eve.

In case you're not familiar with the paper crowns, they come out of Christmas "crackers," which are sort of like toilet paper tubes wrapped in shiny paper of various colors. (You can see a silver one in the above photo.) Everyone at the table holds an end of one with one hand and an end of another with the other hand, so that a chain is formed around the table. Then everybody pulls and they make a terrific popping sound as they come apart. The contents of the tube - which consist of the paper crown, a really bad joke on a small piece of paper, and some small plastic item like a whistle or a tiny yo-yo - then go flying everywhere.

It is mandatory to wear the paper crowns throughout dinner and to tell the lousy jokes. The weirdest joke this year was "What do you get when you cross a cow, a sheep, and a goat? A milky baa kid." If anyone at all gets this, please explain it to my unenlightened family. Poor Justin was quite disturbed and spent most of dinner trying to figure it out.

For dessert we had my famous eggnog cheesecake.

The Bourbon Fruitcake I made is behind the candle, but you don't want to see it, I promise. The whole top of it stuck in the pan, so it's, well, messy-looking.

I had been making a very conscious effort to "go with the flow" this Christmas, and not be attached to things happening a certain way, but the one thing I really was determined to do was walk to Midnight Mass at the San Francisco church. However, by 11:15, having just finished dessert a half hour before, and Eliana still up and cranky, the exhaustion set in and I began the process of talking myself out of it. I put Eliana to bed and was reading her stories when I heard the church bells begin to ring. I squelched the yearning that arose and went back to reading about the Christmas mice who get a present of cheese from the cat. Just then, Justin came into Eliana's room and said he'd take over so I could go. I hedged, but he looked me tenderly in the eye and said, "The bells are calling you."

This was my second time attending Midnight Mass here, but my first since I moved into the neighborhood. There was something liberating and exciting about walking over there by myself late at night. I used to attend Midnight Mass at a cathedral in Baton Rouge, and this one is so different. The cathedral mass was decidedly "high church" with the Gregorian-type music and much solemnity. In this mass all the songs were in Spanish and accompanied by a single acoustic guitar and a mediocre lead singer. The combination of this with the traditional Catholic incense and liturgy gives it a strange combination of high church and low. And then the priest is Scottish. I can't begin to explain the incongruity of the Spanish music and the Scottish brogue, but it works, and is lovely, and somehow holy spaces are created in the disparities.

After the mass, we all walked out through the courtyard, which was lined with luminarias. The statue of St. Clare was circled by them. In the parking lot was a series of small bonfires, and people were standing around them wishing each other a Merry Christmas. I walked home at peace with the world, my heart full of love, pondering the pettiness that often holds that love back. Earlier in the evening, when I was preparing to serve dessert, I had a moment of self-pity because everyone had disappeared and left me to do the dishes, and now here I was serving an elaborate dessert, and no one seemed to even care enough to be there. Unfortunately, I dumped this negativity onto Justin (who was the only one who WAS there), effectively pushing him away for the rest of the evening. As I thought of this, I resolved to be more magnanimous and selfless with those I love.

The house was quiet and dark. When I entered my bedroom, I was greeted by an overpowering scent of essential oils and the sight of Justin and Eliana sprawled out asleep on the bed. Apparently, they had somehow migrated from her room and he had fallen asleep before her, because she had gotten into my essential oils and poured out the entire bottle of cypress and most of the ylang-ylang. She also had found and torn open the little gift I had carefully and beautifully wrapped for Justin earlier and had planned on giving him after Mass.

I felt devastated and angry with Justin for allowing her to do this. All that waste of time and energy and money and scent. But I firmly turned my heart back to what I'd been feeling before I walked into the room, and heroically refrained from losing it. However, in the middle of the night, Eliana woke up and was fussy, and in my sleepy haze, I was grumpy and said something mean to Justin. The next morning, I knew he was hurt and I regretted my harsh words. We avoided talking about it though, putting our personal mess aside to engage in the glorious mess of opening presents.

Later, however, I was sad and discouraged that it's so hard to be kind and loving, and that often when it feels like Justin and I are getting closer, I succumb to a negative emotion and express it in a way that drives him away. Sometimes I feel like a failure, and it's so frustrating to fall into the same stupid mindless destructive habits when I've resolved to change them. At times like that, it just feels overwhelming, and it's hard for me to get back to the perspective that it's a work in progress, a practice, and there will be failures but that's ok. Consequently, I spent most of Christmas afternoon in tears, feeling like I'd "ruined" everything (a lifelong issue for me). Why do I waste so much time making mistakes?

But somehow this emotional spilling was also cleansing. That night, Justin made an awesome stew with the prime rib leftovers and we had a cozy and satisfying evening, lazing about in the messy living room watching the movie, Elf.

So my lesson this Christmas, my big epiphany, is as follows. There are basically three things you can do with the ongoing wastefulness and messiness of life:

Spend most of your time and energy focused on cleaning up messes and regretting making them.
Ignore them.
Transform them into something beautiful by perceiving and attending to the beauty that's already in them.

The first one is the default state for me. Or, more accurately, it's the default state I tend to think I "should" be in. In reality, the second one is equally my default state; I tend to go back and forth between the two. Which is why my house is usually either completely messy or spotless.

I've been reading Karen Armstrong's memoir, The Spiral Staircase, which I won't summarize here, but there is a scene in that book that is relevant to this discussion. After having lived a life of rigid order and discipline, Armstrong goes to board at the house of a family who are very loose and somewhat radically liberal in their lifestyle. She describes the house as being a complete mess, utterly disordered, but she finds this liberating. She says the state of this house reflected "a cheerful disregard for appearances."

In church this past Sunday, the pastor said something about how God doesn't care about how we look on the outside, and I thought of Armstrong's expression. Could it be that God, too, has a cheerful disregard for appearances? The scripture related to the pastor's comment was from Colossians 3, when Paul advises in verse 12 to "clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience." The point is that these are the qualities that give order and peace to our lives, not outward appearances.

When I apply all this to the messiness of relationships, it helps me to remind myself that although there will be mess and waste, these are just "appearances" as long as the qualities listed above are the ongoing focus and goal. Is wrapping paper "wasted" because it's tossed aside to reveal the gift? Was it a waste of time to make all those gingerbread cookies because they were gone in an hour? To take all those "useless" family photos? Was Christmas afternoon wasted because I spent it crying? The answer is No to all of these, if I cheerfully disregard the appearances of waste and focus instead on the spiritual qualities that were shared or expressed or taught.

The third method of dealing with messes and waste came clear to me a couple of days after Christmas, when we went out to visit Justin's mom and her boyfriend at the Earthship they booked for their stay in Taos. (If you're unfamiliar with Earthships, click here.) The basic premise of an Earthship is that they are houses made from as many recycled materials as possible and designed to be extremely energy efficient and sustainable, entirely off the grid.

Linda and Bob stayed in the Phoenix Earthship which has a jungle behind the living room, where banana trees, flowers, and even vegetables are grown.

The walls are constructed with tires, and old glass bottles are used to decorate and filter light through walls.

I'd heard a lot about Earthships, since I live in Taos and the first Earthship community was here, but I'd never been inside one, and was stunned by the beauty and attention to detail.

I tell you, it was just like being in Rivendell. Imagine being in a house where everything feels handmade by a master artisan. That's a TV screen above the fireplace/waterfall.

There was even a strange spiral staircase, and I could see my reflection on its walls.

To take what appears to be waste and turn it into something like this Earthship is downright inspiring. It gives me hope that what is wasted can be redeemed and messes can be transformed into beauty and order. And when it comes to relationships, this experience has given me a new guiding metaphor. Instead of regretting or ignoring their messiness, I can work on turning them into Earthships.